I have been running unRaid for about 12 years, ever since Microsoft discontinued their Home Server. Never lost any data. Absolutely love the product. It's my file share NAS, Plex server, Adguard, VM machine, etc. I have been using the same 4GB thumb drive all that time. It loads the OS into memory at boot and does not access the drive until the next boot. I have mine in a USB inside the case.
3 things of note: 1 appdata backup app is your friend, Plex DB is platform agnostic so it can be moved in it's entirety, and unless you want extra wear on your parity I usually only do it quarterly for a 6 disk array. Also thanks for signing my USB dock I got from you on WN! Works great.
I'm so happy you finally did a video with Unraid. I am convinced that if you play around long enough you will also fall in love and migrate everything to your own Unraid server. Would love an Unraid build live stream when that happens :)
Glad you made a video Lon, you'll like it but as with anything there is a learning curve. I recommend eBay for a usb-dom if you have a spare internal USB port on a standard board. It removes the need for an external USB.
The OS itself won't die, it's slackware. Even if there are issues it would likely be forked somehow as you can compile your own builds currently for it if you really want. It's how people have been using ARC transcoding for AV1 for over a year.
UNRAID looks great visually. Definitely more user-friendly than Proxmox for setting up a server/nas. I'll probably give it a try when I set up my next nas.
If either drive fails you replace it and the data is rebuilt on the new drive. Having only 2 drives really doesn't give you any benefit over just having a backup drive.
Parity data can be reconstructed from the array of disks. So a failure of the parity drive is no problem. Unless of course another drive fails are the same time 😉 there is only so much you can do
Lon, your statement at 3:27 makes zero sense, can you please clarify that? "If you ever have a hardware failure, but all of your drive still work. You can take the internal drives, put them in a new piece of hardware and then boot off of this" (external drive) you're referring to. Nothing is broken then. What did you mean, broken HDD or external SSD?
the license is assigned to the usb drive so any computer you switch to you. Just plug all your drives and your usb stick and boot up and your done switching out systems. If your usb drive dives and you have a back up just reflash the usb and when you boot up it will say your usb is not licensed and ask you to transfer the license to the new usb drive.
If your USB fails there is a process to get the key reassigned to a new USB. Be sure to do backups every so often. 1 key move per year without having to contact support. Get good quality ones as cheap ones (fakes) could have blacklisted GUID because they reuse the number in the fakes.
To review other options for NAS, in the case of this build it was to test how the install works and general settings. Lon is new to the OS and wanted to share his experience.
