The community applications plugin makes UNRAID what it is. All of the functionality they have built into the GUI is fantastic but without the community support, UNRAID would not have gotten so much of my money.
I've been using Unraid for a while and have built up some knowledge of it thanks to the excellent community and staff. One thing I've learned is you shouldn't put an SSD into your array if you're using Parity because Unraid will not allow the SSD to perform any kind of TRIM and if you override it to allow TRIM then it will cause your parity to become corrupted which could be very bad if you then had a drive failure. The right way to use an SSD is either don't use parity on your array (which is obviously not recommended) or place your SSD's as cache pool devices. You can use singular SSD's there or set multiple SSD's as individual devices or together in a RAID1, RAID0 or RAID5 etc So rule of thumb, in the actual array that Unraid creates for you, only use hard disk drives. Keep your flash drives (SATA, SAS or PCIe based etc) out of the main disk array.
Thanks for this and your other content! For anyone watching or deciding on a Home Server solution for a NAS and Hypervisor.. do yourself a favor and listen closely to the conclusion he offers at the end! I was hesitant to spend money on software and decided to try others... I wish I would have just simply listened the first time and spent the money! It would have saved me many hours tinkering, installing, reinstalling, configuring just to come back to where I started as I just wanted something I could spin up and get going.🙂 Long story short, having went through trying them all I'd say if you're a newbie/novice Linux user and/or fall in the category of a power user who just wants a solid NAS who also wants the Hypervisor capabilities to run other servers but doesn't want to spend countless hours configuring/tinkering to configure all of it the way you want then Unraid is the way to go hands down. I'd definitely say if you're the type that wants to get in and simply just get it done then it's worth every penny and then some! The back story... First, I'd say the other OSes have their strengths and use cases, but my experience was riddled with issues to work out in configuration and setup to get it the way I wanted it setup.For OMV I had nothing but issues getting Samba shares configured to work with Windows 11 correctly, and while I could have spent more time fixing those issues (among others), I then tried TrueNAS Scale, and found that it's still new and has a steep learning curve in terms of configuration, and just isn't as intuitive as Unraid is when it comes to setting it up and configuring shares and then containers/apps. I then learned Unraid has many more apps than TrueNAS does and the community support is really that much stronger so if you encounter an issue it's more likely you'll get an answer or help from someone in the community. That's not to say TrueNAS bad or you can't learn how to setup/configure docker/portainer and get custom apps going the way you want but again I wanted something I could just quickly configure setup and run. Then there's Proxmox.. a great Hypervisor but know that it is not setup as a NAS OS and really doesn't have all the bells/whistles for that, and running OMV/TrueNAS or something else under it is not officially supported or recommended (in fact if you have issues there are posts in the forums from others who have issues that don't even get responses because it's just not supported). In my case I had issues with configuring network drivers for other VMs to work correctly with static IPs and routing, and discovered there are known issues with the virtual network driver in certain scenarios. Again, I'm sure I could have figured it out having spent a lot more time going through forums and finding answers, but it turned not to be a simple/easy to deploy solution in combination with a NAS and the issues I had were likely specific to something in my configuration/setup anyway. Hopefully this helps anyone who's on the fence about the money part and if it's worth it...I'd agree with his thoughts in this video for sure just based on my own experience!
I'm new to the data storage game, but I recently built my first server, being a 20tb unRAID and im extremely pleased. It's been very easy to set up, it was fun to build and i continually find new use cases and things I want to build onto it.
I don't run UNRAID because something else meets my needs better; but I certainly do not begrudge them the $60 license because it is ONE TIME and not a subscription. That might be the single cheapest part in your server, and it makes it all work!
I ran unRaid years ago for a couple of year and it was great, did not have the VM or dockers back then but I was coming off Windows Home Server and I really wanted the ability to put whatever drives in it I wanted to, only reason I switched is Synology boxes had some really great mobile apps that would automatically send my photo's, calendar to my home nas and allow me to play my media anywhere which unRaid could not do and it would use way less power than a full PC. I am setting up another unRaid now on an older 8 core Xeon mainly to backup my Synology and to run VM's. Really like TruNas but don't like being forced to use all the same drives especially when I am not going to running a media server on it. I think unRaid is the best choice for casual home and prosumer user available.
Been using unRaid for 5yrs what I like the most is I can add one drive at time to increase the pool size, I stared at 3TB now I'm up to 56TB total and still using my old drives, second best thing if your want to upgrade to a new mobo-cpu all you need is your USB stick and the rest of you drives and HBA card(s) and unRaid will boot right up.
I run 3 unRaid servers (each for different purposes), and love the OS. I used to run FreeNAS, Windows Server and OpenMediaVault , but got rid of them. You forgot to mention that the price for unRaid is a one-time for life cost. All version upgrades are free! Also, unRaid does not require a parity drive. It will run without it, but without parity protection. It would be crazy to run it without parity, but it can be done and the system will not complain. All in all, great review!
I cannot put in to words how thankful I am for the explanation of how to detached pci devices from unraid to be able to pass it through my VMs thank you so much!
Thanks for a great review. Prepping to build my next home media server and have decided UNRAID is the way to go. You're review solidified my decision! Keep up the great work!
Been using unRAID since the days of Windows Home Server, swapped over and never looked back. unRAID also helped me to learn more about docker, Ive had it for years and still haven't scratched the surface on all its uses. Im running it now with my old Opteron 16 core setup (Supermicro H8SGL-F) and when I get my EPYC hardware it's gonna be even sweeter!!! I know it isn't a big deal but swapping hardware three times was a BEAST!!! BEFORE swapping your USB into the next motherboard, note the disk and array slots (assignments), Plug the USB into the new MOBO, boot unRAID and tell unRAID where the disks were in the array and your back up and running!!! to me that is MONEY!!!!
was running freenas up until 2015 and then switched to unraid after i lost a drive and all my data. 3 things that got me hooked on unraid were the ability to add and upgrade disks when the need arose and second is that its easy to use once you get the container naming and mapping down. also love that if you want to upgrade your hardware you don't have to rebuild it from scratch
@@RaidOwl I was in the same boat for awhile. Then eventually it became my main and have another machine running unraid that’s my backup/ testing one. The only thing I don’t like about unraid is the limited number of disks you can have on a array. Which is 28 disks 2 parity. With the new version of unraid that’s coming out you can have multiple pools but it’ll still be nice just to have one array at least for me it would.
@@RaidOwl you can technically use it now with the beta version. Go into the tools tab and upgrade os and select it from there. You can always downgrade and you won’t lose your settings
love this - great review and just what I needed to convince myself to keep unraid:) I've been looking at a replacement for a Windows server with 8x8TB drives. Moved to Proxmox for a bit, then TrueNAS and now running unraid - Overall I'm happy with unraid and the simple way it handles arrays (comparing to my HP P822 Raid6 ADG setup that I previously used). Using a pool for cache (and a dedicated NVMe drive for the docker/vm bits) also works well.
Great overview. I opted for UnRaid on my PowerEdge T420 server. A little clarification, and you may know this now, the cache drive allows you to write data at a high speed (like you said) and stores there until the MOVER executes (not the parity check). It can be set to a schedule. It is different than the parity check (which runs far more infrequently). Additionally, you can tell certain thing to only live on the cache drive. This is handy for things like VMs and Docker containers to allow for much faster subsystems. Really glad you hit on UPS settings.. that was a more recent discovery for me that has saved my bacon already.
@@RaidOwl I, finally, installed an old (GTX 960) GPU in mine today. Driver installed directly from the community app store. Was awesome. I wish they had a free tier, but the cost isn't prohibitive when that one server is my entire home lab now.
Unraid pro 6 years and very happy, got 3 vms my windows sandbox machine, my Kemp balancer and mail server, Plex, guacamole, etc, running a 12 hdd setup, plus 2 ssd pooled cached drive.
Three things: 1. You don't "have" to have a parity drive. You can create an array without one, you just have zero redundancy. 2. You shouldn't put anything that needs TRIM in the array directly. It's not supported. So that NVMe should be a cache drive or an unassigned disk for a VM. 3. I wouldn't consider Unraid a valid Hypervisor. It has a hypervisor in it, but it definitely doesn't replace a "real" hypervisor. Where Unraid really shines is the App community.
1. True...but I'm hardwired to have at least some redundancy in my filesystems. 2. That makes sense. I just don't know the limitations yet of using unassigned disks for services/VMs in Unraid. I'm guessing no raid support, but probably some way to do auto backups to your array? 3. Yeahhhhh semantics 🤷♂️ Thanks for your insight, much appreciated!
@@RaidOwl create a cache with two NVMEs in btrfs. This gives you redundancy. The way you set it up makes your NVME super slow because the parity drive is much much slower. Another solution would be to use the nvme as an unassigned disk for full disk performance and then shutdown and backup/sync your vdisk on a scheduled basis.
@@max-simracing Yeah that makes a lot of sense, definitely an oversight on my part. I shoulda had you guys around when I was messing with it on stream haha.
I have a few unraid servers, one of which I use for experimentation. In the experimentation server, I use NVMe in the main array. I've not really run into any performance problems because of the lack of TRIM. That being said, I wouldn't rely on it for anything important. But, I also wouldn't rely on unraid for mission critical data in the first place. I've had too many run-ins with corrupted data in both XFS and BTRFS. For critical data, I rely on ZFS. For having fun, and experimenting, unraid is great.
@@drewnorth3816 I don't know in which contact btrfs was used there, but btrfs in general does not result in data loss corruption, only if you run it on a single disk without redundancy or maybe in a RAID5/6 where you don't scrub regularly.
Nice video! I _just_ migrated my Windows Server 2019 "Homeserver" to unRAID - it's such a difference. Now I feel stupid for not trying unRAID before =) So yeah, i think it's a good thing *and* a good business model
Just FYI: You can have 2 cached drives setup as Raid 1 so even if a cached drive fails before data is written to the array it is still backed up :). Or you can be like me living life on the edge, and Raid 0 it for twice the space and faster caching.
Thanks for this video! I've heard of unraid on and off for a while, but I couldn't really comprehend what exactly it was. This answered that and showed what all it can do. Thanks again!
I'd say that what makes or breaks any piece of software intended to be accessible to beginners is firstly the quality of the support and secondly the quality of the tutorials available to take you from total noob to up and running, to intermediate user. unRAID does this exceptionally, even uniquely well. And this is a perspective anyone already familiar enough to even use the word "hypervisor" is going to struggle to empathise with. A few years back I went from being total noob to having an up and running system built from an old Haswell era PC thanks almost entirely to the SpaceInvader One You Tube channel - and I don't know of anything remotely equivalent to the depth and breadth of information Ed offers on that channel for anything else?
My home server is running UNRAID. I think the best description of UNRAID is Jack of all trades but master of none. Works ok as a docker server, NAS, and hypervisor but there's better options for all of those. What pushed me to use unRAID was it's simplicity and it's flexibility. I would like to see some changes to it's caching system and it's VM capabilities. unRAIDs caching system is mostly useless for home users and the lack of VM snapshots is kinda sad. Overall it's a great OS
Thanks! yeah the system only has one nvme slot so I'm pretty limited unless I get a pci adapter. Since this was just for trying out...I opted to just leave it lol
If you are running multiple VMs and Dockers, you have to have Cache. You are not risking loosing your data since you can RAID the cache drives (it is using BTRFS RAID - 5 and 6 are still marked as "experimental"). If you want to run Unraid without cache pool, just look for something else, because you are loosing too much performance. SSD in array for VM disks is not a great idea if the VM is heavily used - the parity drive will get overwhelmed and it will limit the SSD performance.
Thank you for making this video. I'm still undecided whether I go with unraid or proxmox. Could you answer the question you posed in the title: is this your new home server hypervisor? You had proxmox about 11 months ago, correct? So has it changed?
The best way to run vms on an ssd is to use a plugin called unassigned devices. Then map your vms to the ssd that way so you have trim available. Trim is not supports for ssds in the array at all at the moment.
@@RaidOwl The standard method is to use a pair of SSD's as a cache. If cost is a factor, halve the ssd size. eg you can get 2 x 500gb ssd for the price of a tb. Run your vm's on the cache drives and map out slow data to the array. eg Windows vm on cache and redirect documents, pictures to the array. That way you can use say 150gb of a 500gb disk for the windows vm whilst having terrabytes available on the array for the slow data.. As a precaution, you can also copy the VM image to a folder on the array and lock it up out of reach of ransomware. If something goes wrong, you can get a working system back quickly. You can also run multiple cache arrays. On some systems I will reserve one cache array for VM's and the other as a file cache for files which will live on the array. Then there is unnassigned drives, but you lose the redundancy in this instance.
I tried truenas because it was free. I ended buying a synology after trying xpenology. Then I tried unraid just for fun, now my media and main pc are unraid. So many use cases for unraid and East for old drives. Unraid runs my plex and rsync backup from synology. My main pc runs many vms for gaming, Linux, macos etc. I don't use truenas at the moment.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on UnRaid I've been using it since version 4 lol. one thing i'd recommend is to use the SSD as a cache drive by creating a pool. thanks for the tools tip, didn't know it was so easy now to release resources for passthrough...
What bothers me about Unraid is that despite all the great efforts, it's base parts aren't as solid as they should be for an OS like this. The RAID concept is broken by design and only works good enough for media collections. The lack of any sort of checksumming, it's parity calculation and it's speed make it unusable for important data. Also why aren't they using a very well tested base like debian or Ubuntu for it. Slack isn't what it once was. Everything in Unraid seems a bit hacky imho. A good example are the patches they apply(ed) to their kernels for BAC0 reset (AMD reset bug), IOMMU group seperation. At the time where they were added they were almost untested and resulted in a lot of problems but the Unraid team just went on to apply them. I dunno but all of that does not leave a good taste in my mouth.
Can you please make a video on explaining and clarifying what are containers like docker containers ? I really get confused between containers and VMs since I think its basically the same thing ? Also this video was great just like your other work, keep it up !
Docker containers use the underlying kernel of the OS they are sitting on, ( Unraid uses linux ), so that's what the dockers would use. Because each docker container would share the kernel of the host OS, again linux in this case, they are much lighter and faster. Vm's have to have their own OS loaded per virtual machine and would be a bit heavier and slower. ( comparatively ) The advantage there though is since they don't need to share the host OS kernel, you can use a wider range of OS's, non linux stuff like Windows, ect.
AST - this video does a great job explaining. You can watch just the first 5 minutes for the high level overview: ruclips.net/video/CcxbHkqzJuI/видео.html
Thank you. I'm running a synology desktop model right now which has done well but it only holds 5 drives which I've maxed out. I'll probably go with Unraid on my next server build to run windows VMs now that I've switched all my daily driver PCs to Fedora.
Love the review. I been running unraid for . . . 2 years now? It's so easy, also to move between hardware. Than again, like you said at the end. The 'up front' cost has probably prevented me from trying other ones. The biggest downside i have found, even tho its easy to use, the support is . . . not that great. Even the community is a bit 'elitist' if you ask for my opinion.
I've tried TrueNAS Scale, but now the serial headaches have got me searching for something else and judging from your first impressions and the comments here, I'm going to give it a try. Thanks for the review :)
@@AlphaConde-qy7vi I would like to tell you that I'm now a happy user of Open Media Vault. The problem was that my disks were formatted with ZFS from TrueNAS Scale and Unraid didn't support that when I tried it, I couldn't even format the disks and had to format them from another computer. ZFS itself can have some compatibility issues with Docker for reasons that are beyond me, but I understand that it's something that you can configure yourself out of. ZFS is also more demanding in regards to RAM. Unraid is also not for me, because I don't like it's filesystem / disk handling.
What is UnRaid? Is it an alternative to buying a Synology/Qnap/WD NAS box with HDs loaded? Is some sort of software that transforms your junk, like an old iMac or external G-Drive, into a NAS with all the abilities, like sharing file with devices over the ‘net, or serving movies via PLEX?
I know old video, but I use Trunas as my fast/sensitive data such as when I need it for rendering, ZFS on truenas is just so much faster, but Unraid as I cant program my way out of a wet paper bag, with its apps/docker managment is where I do all of that sort of stuff, like my ever growing library of "linux isos" .... the UI on unraid and setting it up so so much better than Truenas, but Truenas is a tank and I need it to be.
you coulb possibly use a sata to usb adapter and write it to the ssd that way. i have not tried that.
2 года назад+1
I use Proxmox on an HP Proliant D380 G7. My storage is a heavily modified HP Proliant D360 G4 with 4TB running Truenas. I run my Docker containers on a Ubuntu VM in Proxmox.
@jorn, I'm at nood on this and I love unraid specifically for dockers but anyway I can run a docker manager ( similar to the one in unraid ) on ubuntu server.. Basically, I know nothing about CLI and its intimidating and I feel like everything in linux vm / proxmox need cli..
I moved to Unraid from Truenas. Almost nothing worked on Truenas for me except the SMB share and that wouldn't work for half the computers in my network, I thought it was the old Hardware I was using but after switching to Unraid everything worked. The community and documentation is so much better too. Unraid is slower but you can get ZFS to work on it. It's also worth noting that you can request an extension to your free trial which I did and it gave me an extra 14 days before I decided to buy it.
I have never had so many disk issues with any OS as I had with TrueNAS Scale, it's bordering on ridiculous. Also had issues with SMB, it took me many hours to fix them. The app installation is a joke, the catalog refresh fails, the app installation fails.
There isn't any kind of disk management inside the Unraid gui and it doesn't recognize the XFS partition I made from the CLI. Same problem with three different disks. "file -s" sees the XFS partition fine, but unraid doesn't recognize it.
was using Truenas and it's VM function at first, but found out certain Linux doesn't run properly and wonky at times. now I'm running Proxmox and Truenas as VM. Pretty good so far! May give VMware or Unraid a try once I got better hardware.
Thanks for the overview of unraid. I am in the process of trying to determine what hypervisor server to use at home. I don't mind paying for software if its a good value.
I wanted to run a plex server and all the automated media management dockers, a windows vm for gaming, next cloud and a Minecraft server off an 8 core i9 and 64gb of ram. Unraid let me do all this and more without having to enter the dreaded terminal.
@@ajandruzzi Tony, I want to do something very similar. Plex, Windows Gaming, Docker, data backup. What type gaming performance can you get from a Windows 10 VM if the Unraid system has a decent GPU?
@@nrnoble What sudoki said. I have only run the current graphics card in my server (rx 6600xt) in a VM but I’m getting performance that is within the margin of error vs benchmarks I’ve seen. If you use an Nvidia card, just make sure you pass through the gpu bios. You can find a huge list of ripped bios files at tech power up.
@@dant6067 I think you may have a chance with TrueNAS Core, I've heard that it's more stable than TrueNAS Scale. Scale is horrible, I had lot's of issues with two SSD disks, it fails updating catalogs, it fails installing apps and nothing is written in the logs.
Question, will unraid be a good candidate for a pfSense VM, windows VM strictly for NextPVR and VM just for a nginx reverse proxy? I have an existing TrueNAS server that for only backups and storage, trying to decide if another TrueNAS system with VMs as described or Unraid will suffice. Thanks.
Hey, I've been using pfSense in an Unraid VM for a few years now...... very stable and no problems at all. It's ad killer is awesome too. I also use VM's for Home Assistant and a W11 VM solely for Blue Iris. All of it is reverse proxied using a Cloudflare/Argo tunnel combo and nginx proxy manager in a Docker. All very stable. I got into Unraid over ten years ago as I was sick of my Raid5 constantly falling over and losing data. So, yes it costs...... but for me, that cost divided by 10 years and counting is peanuts compared to the lack of drama and the way the whole ecosystem has advanced. It truly has got so much more capable and despite that, it is easier to use than ever before.
BRO …… I wish i seen this video a few months ago 😢……. You did a great job explaining sh_t ….. I have surface understanding of data storage and home labs. And i was looking for something to get me started…… I went the Proxmox route and now seeing this I’m about to start over and PISS off the wife…. If she is reading this i love you ❤❤❤😂😂😂 pray for me
I mention later in the video that I want an ssd there for VMs to run to off of. I would have a much different configuration if this was my actual prod server.
I have a few vms on cache that I spin up rarely and I have a few running 24\7 on unassigned devices.If your running a nvr or torrents etc, use an unassigned drive to write to, don't write to cache or array, that will wear them out quickly and slow performance.
@@RaidOwl another channel I follow has said that sometimes comments they go to answer or respond to have disappeared. Weird stuff on RUclips these days.
@@RaidOwl basically I was appreciating your genuine reaction to Unraid, as I am trying to find the most intuitive simple for a pleb all in one sever/NAS software. If I had the money to build what I want right now, I would have to go with unraid as it checks most of the boxes. But if I can't build what I want for a couple of years truenas scale might be what I want at that time. Good job, enjoy the content.
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The community applications plugin makes UNRAID what it is. All of the functionality they have built into the GUI is fantastic but without the community support, UNRAID would not have gotten so much of my money.
I've been using Unraid for a while and have built up some knowledge of it thanks to the excellent community and staff. One thing I've learned is you shouldn't put an SSD into your array if you're using Parity because Unraid will not allow the SSD to perform any kind of TRIM and if you override it to allow TRIM then it will cause your parity to become corrupted which could be very bad if you then had a drive failure.
The right way to use an SSD is either don't use parity on your array (which is obviously not recommended) or place your SSD's as cache pool devices. You can use singular SSD's there or set multiple SSD's as individual devices or together in a RAID1, RAID0 or RAID5 etc
So rule of thumb, in the actual array that Unraid creates for you, only use hard disk drives. Keep your flash drives (SATA, SAS or PCIe based etc) out of the main disk array.
Thanks for this and your other content! For anyone watching or deciding on a Home Server solution for a NAS and Hypervisor.. do yourself a favor and listen closely to the conclusion he offers at the end! I was hesitant to spend money on software and decided to try others... I wish I would have just simply listened the first time and spent the money! It would have saved me many hours tinkering, installing, reinstalling, configuring just to come back to where I started as I just wanted something I could spin up and get going.🙂
Long story short, having went through trying them all I'd say if you're a newbie/novice Linux user and/or fall in the category of a power user who just wants a solid NAS who also wants the Hypervisor capabilities to run other servers but doesn't want to spend countless hours configuring/tinkering to configure all of it the way you want then Unraid is the way to go hands down. I'd definitely say if you're the type that wants to get in and simply just get it done then it's worth every penny and then some!
The back story...
First, I'd say the other OSes have their strengths and use cases, but my experience was riddled with issues to work out in configuration and setup to get it the way I wanted it setup.For OMV I had nothing but issues getting Samba shares configured to work with Windows 11 correctly, and while I could have spent more time fixing those issues (among others), I then tried TrueNAS Scale, and found that it's still new and has a steep learning curve in terms of configuration, and just isn't as intuitive as Unraid is when it comes to setting it up and configuring shares and then containers/apps. I then learned Unraid has many more apps than TrueNAS does and the community support is really that much stronger so if you encounter an issue it's more likely you'll get an answer or help from someone in the community. That's not to say TrueNAS bad or you can't learn how to setup/configure docker/portainer and get custom apps going the way you want but again I wanted something I could just quickly configure setup and run. Then there's Proxmox.. a great Hypervisor but know that it is not setup as a NAS OS and really doesn't have all the bells/whistles for that, and running OMV/TrueNAS or something else under it is not officially supported or recommended (in fact if you have issues there are posts in the forums from others who have issues that don't even get responses because it's just not supported). In my case I had issues with configuring network drivers for other VMs to work correctly with static IPs and routing, and discovered there are known issues with the virtual network driver in certain scenarios. Again, I'm sure I could have figured it out having spent a lot more time going through forums and finding answers, but it turned not to be a simple/easy to deploy solution in combination with a NAS and the issues I had were likely specific to something in my configuration/setup anyway. Hopefully this helps anyone who's on the fence about the money part and if it's worth it...I'd agree with his thoughts in this video for sure just based on my own experience!
I'm new to the data storage game, but I recently built my first server, being a 20tb unRAID and im extremely pleased. It's been very easy to set up, it was fun to build and i continually find new use cases and things I want to build onto it.
Awesome stuff!
I don't run UNRAID because something else meets my needs better; but I certainly do not begrudge them the $60 license because it is ONE TIME and not a subscription. That might be the single cheapest part in your server, and it makes it all work!
I ran unRaid years ago for a couple of year and it was great, did not have the VM or dockers back then but I was coming off Windows Home Server and I really wanted the ability to put whatever drives in it I wanted to, only reason I switched is Synology boxes had some really great mobile apps that would automatically send my photo's, calendar to my home nas and allow me to play my media anywhere which unRaid could not do and it would use way less power than a full PC. I am setting up another unRaid now on an older 8 core Xeon mainly to backup my Synology and to run VM's. Really like TruNas but don't like being forced to use all the same drives especially when I am not going to running a media server on it. I think unRaid is the best choice for casual home and prosumer user available.
Been using unRaid for 5yrs what I like the most is I can add one drive at time to increase the pool size, I stared at 3TB now I'm up to 56TB total and still using my old drives, second best thing if your want to upgrade to a new mobo-cpu all you need is your USB stick and the rest of you drives and HBA card(s) and unRaid will boot right up.
From 3 to 56 TB haha that’s awesome. Have you tried any other hypervisors or just one and done with Unraid?
I run 3 unRaid servers (each for different purposes), and love the OS. I used to run FreeNAS, Windows Server and OpenMediaVault , but got rid of them. You forgot to mention that the price for unRaid is a one-time for life cost. All version upgrades are free!
Also, unRaid does not require a parity drive. It will run without it, but without parity protection. It would be crazy to run it without parity, but it can be done and the system will not complain.
All in all, great review!
Why use a parity, 1 parity is dumb, 2 parity is slow, I'd prefer using ext. drives for redundancy and copying the files to the drive twice per month.
I cannot put in to words how thankful I am for the explanation of how to detached pci devices from unraid to be able to pass it through my VMs thank you so much!
Thanks for a great review. Prepping to build my next home media server and have decided UNRAID is the way to go. You're review solidified my decision! Keep up the great work!
Been using unRAID since the days of Windows Home Server, swapped over and never looked back. unRAID also helped me to learn more about docker, Ive had it for years and still haven't scratched the surface on all its uses. Im running it now with my old Opteron 16 core setup (Supermicro H8SGL-F) and when I get my EPYC hardware it's gonna be even sweeter!!! I know it isn't a big deal but swapping hardware three times was a BEAST!!! BEFORE swapping your USB into the next motherboard, note the disk and array slots (assignments), Plug the USB into the new MOBO, boot unRAID and tell unRAID where the disks were in the array and your back up and running!!! to me that is MONEY!!!!
was running freenas up until 2015 and then switched to unraid after i lost a drive and all my data. 3 things that got me hooked on unraid were the ability to add and upgrade disks when the need arose and second is that its easy to use once you get the container naming and mapping down. also love that if you want to upgrade your hardware you don't have to rebuild it from scratch
Unraid seems like a good fit for my backup/testing server.
@@RaidOwl I was in the same boat for awhile. Then eventually it became my main and have another machine running unraid that’s my backup/ testing one. The only thing I don’t like about unraid is the limited number of disks you can have on a array. Which is 28 disks 2 parity. With the new version of unraid that’s coming out you can have multiple pools but it’ll still be nice just to have one array at least for me it would.
I didn't know they were working on adding multiple pools to a new version. That would be awesome.
@@RaidOwl you can technically use it now with the beta version. Go into the tools tab and upgrade os and select it from there. You can always downgrade and you won’t lose your settings
I'm digging this up pretty late: can you share how you lost all of your data? Anything I should watch out for with truenas?
love this - great review and just what I needed to convince myself to keep unraid:) I've been looking at a replacement for a Windows server with 8x8TB drives. Moved to Proxmox for a bit, then TrueNAS and now running unraid - Overall I'm happy with unraid and the simple way it handles arrays (comparing to my HP P822 Raid6 ADG setup that I previously used). Using a pool for cache (and a dedicated NVMe drive for the docker/vm bits) also works well.
How are you transferring/keeping all your data during those big moves?
Great overview. I opted for UnRaid on my PowerEdge T420 server. A little clarification, and you may know this now, the cache drive allows you to write data at a high speed (like you said) and stores there until the MOVER executes (not the parity check). It can be set to a schedule. It is different than the parity check (which runs far more infrequently). Additionally, you can tell certain thing to only live on the cache drive. This is handy for things like VMs and Docker containers to allow for much faster subsystems. Really glad you hit on UPS settings.. that was a more recent discovery for me that has saved my bacon already.
Yeah I def didn’t handle the cache stuff well, so I’ve learned a good bit and have made some changes for how it’ll run in the future.
@@RaidOwl I, finally, installed an old (GTX 960) GPU in mine today. Driver installed directly from the community app store. Was awesome. I wish they had a free tier, but the cost isn't prohibitive when that one server is my entire home lab now.
Yeah the cost isn’t bad at all if you just have one or two
Unraid pro 6 years and very happy, got 3 vms my windows sandbox machine, my Kemp balancer and mail server, Plex, guacamole, etc, running a 12 hdd setup, plus 2 ssd pooled cached drive.
Three things:
1. You don't "have" to have a parity drive. You can create an array without one, you just have zero redundancy.
2. You shouldn't put anything that needs TRIM in the array directly. It's not supported. So that NVMe should be a cache drive or an unassigned disk for a VM.
3. I wouldn't consider Unraid a valid Hypervisor. It has a hypervisor in it, but it definitely doesn't replace a "real" hypervisor. Where Unraid really shines is the App community.
1. True...but I'm hardwired to have at least some redundancy in my filesystems.
2. That makes sense. I just don't know the limitations yet of using unassigned disks for services/VMs in Unraid. I'm guessing no raid support, but probably some way to do auto backups to your array?
3. Yeahhhhh semantics 🤷♂️
Thanks for your insight, much appreciated!
@@RaidOwl create a cache with two NVMEs in btrfs. This gives you redundancy. The way you set it up makes your NVME super slow because the parity drive is much much slower.
Another solution would be to use the nvme as an unassigned disk for full disk performance and then shutdown and backup/sync your vdisk on a scheduled basis.
@@max-simracing Yeah that makes a lot of sense, definitely an oversight on my part. I shoulda had you guys around when I was messing with it on stream haha.
I have a few unraid servers, one of which I use for experimentation. In the experimentation server, I use NVMe in the main array. I've not really run into any performance problems because of the lack of TRIM. That being said, I wouldn't rely on it for anything important. But, I also wouldn't rely on unraid for mission critical data in the first place. I've had too many run-ins with corrupted data in both XFS and BTRFS. For critical data, I rely on ZFS. For having fun, and experimenting, unraid is great.
@@drewnorth3816 I don't know in which contact btrfs was used there, but btrfs in general does not result in data loss corruption, only if you run it on a single disk without redundancy or maybe in a RAID5/6 where you don't scrub regularly.
Nice video! I _just_ migrated my Windows Server 2019 "Homeserver" to unRAID - it's such a difference. Now I feel stupid for not trying unRAID before =) So yeah, i think it's a good thing *and* a good business model
Just FYI: You can have 2 cached drives setup as Raid 1 so even if a cached drive fails before data is written to the array it is still backed up :).
Or you can be like me living life on the edge, and Raid 0 it for twice the space and faster caching.
For sure...I just only have a single nvme slot and no extra sata ssds laying around lol
Thanks for this video! I've heard of unraid on and off for a while, but I couldn't really comprehend what exactly it was. This answered that and showed what all it can do. Thanks again!
I'd say that what makes or breaks any piece of software intended to be accessible to beginners is firstly the quality of the support and secondly the quality of the tutorials available to take you from total noob to up and running, to intermediate user.
unRAID does this exceptionally, even uniquely well. And this is a perspective anyone already familiar enough to even use the word "hypervisor" is going to struggle to empathise with.
A few years back I went from being total noob to having an up and running system built from an old Haswell era PC thanks almost entirely to the SpaceInvader One You Tube channel - and I don't know of anything remotely equivalent to the depth and breadth of information Ed offers on that channel for anything else?
My home server is running UNRAID. I think the best description of UNRAID is Jack of all trades but master of none. Works ok as a docker server, NAS, and hypervisor but there's better options for all of those. What pushed me to use unRAID was it's simplicity and it's flexibility. I would like to see some changes to it's caching system and it's VM capabilities. unRAIDs caching system is mostly useless for home users and the lack of VM snapshots is kinda sad. Overall it's a great OS
I run Unraid PRO :D . Do I need unlimited storage devices? No, but I'm happy to support the project.
Great video! FYI you can use a second SSD for the cache in raid1 so you won't lose it.
Thanks! yeah the system only has one nvme slot so I'm pretty limited unless I get a pci adapter. Since this was just for trying out...I opted to just leave it lol
If you are running multiple VMs and Dockers, you have to have Cache. You are not risking loosing your data since you can RAID the cache drives (it is using BTRFS RAID - 5 and 6 are still marked as "experimental"). If you want to run Unraid without cache pool, just look for something else, because you are loosing too much performance. SSD in array for VM disks is not a great idea if the VM is heavily used - the parity drive will get overwhelmed and it will limit the SSD performance.
Thank you for making this video. I'm still undecided whether I go with unraid or proxmox.
Could you answer the question you posed in the title: is this your new home server hypervisor? You had proxmox about 11 months ago, correct? So has it changed?
I’m still a Proxmox boy :)
@@RaidOwl thanks!!
The added ability to now easily use zfs is a welcomed feature.
The best way to run vms on an ssd is to use a plugin called unassigned devices. Then map your vms to the ssd that way so you have trim available. Trim is not supports for ssds in the array at all at the moment.
Yeah someone else mentioned this. I didn’t know it even existed lol
@@RaidOwl The standard method is to use a pair of SSD's as a cache. If cost is a factor, halve the ssd size. eg you can get 2 x 500gb ssd for the price of a tb. Run your vm's on the cache drives and map out slow data to the array. eg Windows vm on cache and redirect documents, pictures to the array. That way you can use say 150gb of a 500gb disk for the windows vm whilst having terrabytes available on the array for the slow data.. As a precaution, you can also copy the VM image to a folder on the array and lock it up out of reach of ransomware. If something goes wrong, you can get a working system back quickly. You can also run multiple cache arrays. On some systems I will reserve one cache array for VM's and the other as a file cache for files which will live on the array. Then there is unnassigned drives, but you lose the redundancy in this instance.
I love Unraid does everything I need and I don’t have to manage it on a daily basis.
I tried truenas because it was free. I ended buying a synology after trying xpenology. Then I tried unraid just for fun, now my media and main pc are unraid. So many use cases for unraid and East for old drives. Unraid runs my plex and rsync backup from synology. My main pc runs many vms for gaming, Linux, macos etc. I don't use truenas at the moment.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on UnRaid I've been using it since version 4 lol. one thing i'd recommend is to use the SSD as a cache drive by creating a pool. thanks for the tools tip, didn't know it was so easy now to release resources for passthrough...
What bothers me about Unraid is that despite all the great efforts, it's base parts aren't as solid as they should be for an OS like this. The RAID concept is broken by design and only works good enough for media collections. The lack of any sort of checksumming, it's parity calculation and it's speed make it unusable for important data. Also why aren't they using a very well tested base like debian or Ubuntu for it. Slack isn't what it once was. Everything in Unraid seems a bit hacky imho. A good example are the patches they apply(ed) to their kernels for BAC0 reset (AMD reset bug), IOMMU group seperation. At the time where they were added they were almost untested and resulted in a lot of problems but the Unraid team just went on to apply them. I dunno but all of that does not leave a good taste in my mouth.
Can you please make a video on explaining and clarifying what are containers like docker containers ? I really get confused between containers and VMs since I think its basically the same thing ?
Also this video was great just like your other work, keep it up !
Docker containers use the underlying kernel of the OS they are sitting on, ( Unraid uses linux ), so that's what the dockers would use. Because each docker container would share the kernel of the host OS, again linux in this case, they are much lighter and faster. Vm's have to have their own OS loaded per virtual machine and would be a bit heavier and slower. ( comparatively ) The advantage there though is since they don't need to share the host OS kernel, you can use a wider range of OS's, non linux stuff like Windows, ect.
AST - this video does a great job explaining. You can watch just the first 5 minutes for the high level overview:
ruclips.net/video/CcxbHkqzJuI/видео.html
Thank you. I'm running a synology desktop model right now which has done well but it only holds 5 drives which I've maxed out. I'll probably go with Unraid on my next server build to run windows VMs now that I've switched all my daily driver PCs to Fedora.
Great video! Have your thoughts changed much over the past year since they did some updates?
Love the review. I been running unraid for . . . 2 years now? It's so easy, also to move between hardware. Than again, like you said at the end. The 'up front' cost has probably prevented me from trying other ones. The biggest downside i have found, even tho its easy to use, the support is . . . not that great. Even the community is a bit 'elitist' if you ask for my opinion.
I have never met a Linux forum that didn't feel at least a little elitist but the Unraid community has felt like the least offending group so far.
is it possible to use Kubernetes also on the Unraid? along with Docker? or I should do that on a VM within Unraid? thanks good video
I've tried TrueNAS Scale, but now the serial headaches have got me searching for something else and judging from your first impressions and the comments here, I'm going to give it a try. Thanks for the review :)
Ok, Unraid is a total fuckup with disks that have been formatted with ZFS.
@@FSchackWould you mind describing what's wrong with the ZFS implementation ?
@@AlphaConde-qy7vi I would like to tell you that I'm now a happy user of Open Media Vault. The problem was that my disks were formatted with ZFS from TrueNAS Scale and Unraid didn't support that when I tried it, I couldn't even format the disks and had to format them from another computer. ZFS itself can have some compatibility issues with Docker for reasons that are beyond me, but I understand that it's something that you can configure yourself out of. ZFS is also more demanding in regards to RAM. Unraid is also not for me, because I don't like it's filesystem / disk handling.
What is UnRaid? Is it an alternative to buying a Synology/Qnap/WD NAS box with HDs loaded? Is some sort of software that transforms your junk, like an old iMac or external G-Drive, into a NAS with all the abilities, like sharing file with devices over the ‘net, or serving movies via PLEX?
I know old video, but I use Trunas as my fast/sensitive data such as when I need it for rendering, ZFS on truenas is just so much faster, but Unraid as I cant program my way out of a wet paper bag, with its apps/docker managment is where I do all of that sort of stuff, like my ever growing library of "linux isos" .... the UI on unraid and setting it up so so much better than Truenas, but Truenas is a tank and I need it to be.
Unraid needs to get with the program and allow the system to be ran from a disk. Besides that I have no other complaints.
it boots from usb, but runs in ram after
you coulb possibly use a sata to usb adapter and write it to the ssd that way. i have not tried that.
I use Proxmox on an HP Proliant D380 G7. My storage is a heavily modified HP Proliant D360 G4 with 4TB running Truenas. I run my Docker containers on a Ubuntu VM in Proxmox.
@jorn, I'm at nood on this and I love unraid specifically for dockers
but anyway I can run a docker manager ( similar to the one in unraid ) on ubuntu server..
Basically, I know nothing about CLI and its intimidating and I feel like everything in linux vm / proxmox need cli..
I have an old ProLiant ML350 G6 sitting around, I was wondering if I could use Proxmox on it, I have hope!!!! Thanks!!!
Brilliant, thanks for the video.
unRAID all the way :-). Thankyou for your vid and welcome to unRAID society 😀
I moved to Unraid from Truenas. Almost nothing worked on Truenas for me except the SMB share and that wouldn't work for half the computers in my network, I thought it was the old Hardware I was using but after switching to Unraid everything worked. The community and documentation is so much better too. Unraid is slower but you can get ZFS to work on it. It's also worth noting that you can request an extension to your free trial which I did and it gave me an extra 14 days before I decided to buy it.
You can actually request two extensions, for a total of 28 extra days. Not too shabby.
I have never had so many disk issues with any OS as I had with TrueNAS Scale, it's bordering on ridiculous. Also had issues with SMB, it took me many hours to fix them. The app installation is a joke, the catalog refresh fails, the app installation fails.
Thanks owl, im a server guy so this is my jam!
Currently running Proxmox with VMs for pihole, wifi AP controller, and Plex. Building an unRAID server to use a bunch of random old HDs instead.
I know it doesn't support it natively, but the ZFS community plugin I hear is good.
Noted!
There isn't any kind of disk management inside the Unraid gui and it doesn't recognize the XFS partition I made from the CLI. Same problem with three different disks. "file -s" sees the XFS partition fine, but unraid doesn't recognize it.
was using Truenas and it's VM function at first, but found out certain Linux doesn't run properly and wonky at times. now I'm running Proxmox and Truenas as VM. Pretty good so far! May give VMware or Unraid a try once I got better hardware.
TrueNAS as a hypervisor isn't great lol. I'm in the same boat as you...Proxmox with TrueNAS virtualized and I love it.
Are you running TrueNAS Core or Scale?? Personally I think Scale is a piece of garbage.
Thanks for the overview of unraid. I am in the process of trying to determine what hypervisor server to use at home. I don't mind paying for software if its a good value.
I wanted to run a plex server and all the automated media management dockers, a windows vm for gaming, next cloud and a Minecraft server off an 8 core i9 and 64gb of ram. Unraid let me do all this and more without having to enter the dreaded terminal.
@@ajandruzzi Tony, I want to do something very similar. Plex, Windows Gaming, Docker, data backup. What type gaming performance can you get from a Windows 10 VM if the Unraid system has a decent GPU?
@@nrnoble What sudoki said. I have only run the current graphics card in my server (rx 6600xt) in a VM but I’m getting performance that is within the margin of error vs benchmarks I’ve seen. If you use an Nvidia card, just make sure you pass through the gpu bios. You can find a huge list of ripped bios files at tech power up.
I am running UNRAID, for the last 6 ,months
Do you think this will do well on a Dell optiplex bade server?
I think you want the SSD configured as a cache drive, esp if you are copying larger files like VMs up to unraid
You’re right. Def an oversight on my part but lesson learned.
Since ESXi is free, I have no reason to use anything else.
LOL! You made me laugh hard with the bar and cache pickup line haha... Greetings from Argentina!
Haha glad you enjoyed!
And the girl says: “ya that’s why I run my cache pool in a mirror with two drives” ;)
@@godelrt then you marry her
A timestamp would been nice, you got me curious 👀
Personally my fav joke is right in the opening from 0-14sec. It’s a good one @Raid Owl
I'm waiting for an Unraid black friday discount. If they don't offer one this year like they did last year, then I'll set up TrueNAS Scale instead.
Good luck with that :D I'm done with that piece of junk.
@@FSchack What's junk? Unraid or TrueNAS?
@@dant6067 TrueNAS Scale is junk.
@@dant6067 I think you may have a chance with TrueNAS Core, I've heard that it's more stable than TrueNAS Scale. Scale is horrible, I had lot's of issues with two SSD disks, it fails updating catalogs, it fails installing apps and nothing is written in the logs.
You can mirror the cache disk. (I am sure this has been said)
Great video. Thank you.
Question, will unraid be a good candidate for a pfSense VM, windows VM strictly for NextPVR and VM just for a nginx reverse proxy? I have an existing TrueNAS server that for only backups and storage, trying to decide if another TrueNAS system with VMs as described or Unraid will suffice. Thanks.
Hey, I've been using pfSense in an Unraid VM for a few years now...... very stable and no problems at all. It's ad killer is awesome too. I also use VM's for Home Assistant and a W11 VM solely for Blue Iris. All of it is reverse proxied using a Cloudflare/Argo tunnel combo and nginx proxy manager in a Docker. All very stable. I got into Unraid over ten years ago as I was sick of my Raid5 constantly falling over and losing data. So, yes it costs...... but for me, that cost divided by 10 years and counting is peanuts compared to the lack of drama and the way the whole ecosystem has advanced. It truly has got so much more capable and despite that, it is easier to use than ever before.
@@BerkeleyTowers hey, thanks much to take the time to reply. I am going to check out unraid.
I don’t see the advantage of it having to boot of a USB. What if it breaks or you loose it? Then you have to pay for another full license?
Nah you can transfer it
I had the same question. You can transfer it a couple of times per year, and you can also back it up.
What if you write the Unraid image to a M.2 via USB? would that bypass the *USB OS* ?
Nope, not as of today
proxmox all the way but unraid does look good.
Any chance of you doing a test run / comparison of XCP-NG?
It’s definitely on my to-do list. Possibly a live stream in the near future.
Running PROX :-)
BRO …… I wish i seen this video a few months ago 😢……. You did a great job explaining sh_t ….. I have surface understanding of data storage and home labs. And i was looking for something to get me started…… I went the Proxmox route and now seeing this I’m about to start over and PISS off the wife…. If she is reading this i love you ❤❤❤😂😂😂 pray for me
unraid here
why u use ssd to array? not good, use ssd cache pool, maybi cache RAID1 ???
I mention later in the video that I want an ssd there for VMs to run to off of. I would have a much different configuration if this was my actual prod server.
@@RaidOwl
if you have a parity disk HDD you will not benefit from ssd disk if you use it with array !! use ssd disks separately as a raid1 cache pool
Hmm makes sense. I’ll try it out
I have a few vms on cache that I spin up rarely and I have a few running 24\7 on unassigned devices.If your running a nvr or torrents etc, use an unassigned drive to write to, don't write to cache or array, that will wear them out quickly and slow performance.
Bummer. My original comment got deleted some how.
Weird. Wasn’t me 🤷🏻♂️
@@RaidOwl another channel I follow has said that sometimes comments they go to answer or respond to have disappeared. Weird stuff on RUclips these days.
@@7MBoosted Yeah its not even in my "Need to be approved" section lol
@@RaidOwl basically I was appreciating your genuine reaction to Unraid, as I am trying to find the most intuitive simple for a pleb all in one sever/NAS software. If I had the money to build what I want right now, I would have to go with unraid as it checks most of the boxes. But if I can't build what I want for a couple of years truenas scale might be what I want at that time. Good job, enjoy the content.
@7:50 - I think you should then mark your video: "NOT FOR CHILDREN" - buhahahaha
why this guy look like a runescape bot
Idk ask my parents
Those mice and keyboards look very cheap.
I’m poor
@@RaidOwl false economy!
Hi Like your videos, but the sound in awful like your on a cheap phone,
....pfff....a piece of s..t !!! a lot of problems...
Proxmox.