As someone who works with TrueNAS and ZFS daily, I like Unraid because I don’t have to think too hard to use it. Some might say this sucks the fun out of life, but when I just want some network storage dammit, it’s a welcome change of pace.
Important notes and tips: 1. Unraid REQUIRES a USB stick (i.e. you can't boot off SSD, not even an eMMC chip), which is both a pro and a con. If your stick drops offline (which is not uncommon with USB 3.0 devices), your server will crash. If your stick overheats and dies (which is not uncommon with USB 3.0 devices), your server will crash. Oh and the stick is your license. So make sure to get a good branded stick and a USB3.0-to-USB2.0 adapter / cable. It will boot a bit slower (about 10s) but it will be a lot more stable. 1b. I'm actually quite disillusioned with Unraid folks for their continuous and outright refusal to allow booting from SSD. I have no problem with keeping the USB stick as my license key but having a production server booting off USB stick is just unconscionable in 2020s. 2. ZFS and gaming VM don't mix. ZFS uses whatever cores it wants and under heavy IO, even with core isolation, your gaming VM will lag. This has been an issue for many years but isn't fixed because I guess it's a relatively small overlap so low demand for fix. 3. Unraid parity mechanic only applies to the "array" - there is only 1 array of max 30 devices. You can do normal RAID stuff with unlimited number of "pools" (formerly cache pool, formerly just cache). So as a NAS, it's a best of both world e.g. less important media library in the array, more important data in ZFS z1 pool, appdata on a raid-1 btrfs pool, temp download in a single-device xfs pool, etc. Source: using Unraid since 2015.
Noticed references online that the 'drives' Unraid sees and applies toward licensing is any drives visible at OS boot. I'm considering migrating from Proxmox to Unraid. I currently have a 1TB NVMe and 1TB SATA SSD for the system boot drive that doubles as the backing for my VM and Container virtual disks. Running a TrueNAS VM with a SATA controller passed through which manages a ZFS pool of 5 hard drives. Thinking a comparable Unraid setup would be a mirrored pool of some sort using the NVMe and SATA SSD, and an additional pool using the 5x HDD's for my data. Seems to me that in this setup, I'm still looking at a total of 7 disks and would therefore need the Plus license. Oh, and wondering, could a pool allocated for storage backing of VM and Containers be also leveraged for caching? Thanks for the excellent run down on the 5 pros and cons for Unraid. Truly enjoyed the video.
Yikes. I did NOT know you cannot boot from an SSD. I was under the impression you just kept the USB stick as the license. A hassle, but not the end of the world. Running a server from a USB stick is taking the piss. Especially as they are charging for it. Thank you for telling me this. I can stop listening to all the sales folk on RU-vid singing it's praises now. That is a joke. There is no way I'm trusting my home server with a. $10 USB stick. Shit, I'm not going to trust it with a $1000 USB stick, it's still a f***** USB stick at the end of the day.
Write performance is around 75 Mb/s and read is the speed of a single hard drive e.g. 200-250 Mb/s. Add cashe and its possibly to saturate a 10GBe connection. I have 2TB nvme ssd as cashe and 10GBe. Data will be moved from cashe to the drives by schedule. IMO one of the best things with unraid is that not all drives will be spinning all the time. Only the one drive that holds the data in use will spin up. This saves a lot of electricity.
@@jacobp7289 It does...I have a 14TB parity, 10TB and 2 X 6TB data drives, all enterprise grade as they didn't cost much more and hopefully I will get a better lifespan out of them
@@342design Again, then the OS should not crash if the USB stick fails. Considering I'm sure it does it's reading something off the disk so it's not totally cached in memory.
@@nadtz if you run a low memory system it can swap in and out of ram. if you run 96 GB of ram like me, your stick could be dead for a week and not see issues (but get error warnings) until you reboot.
As of now the pricing has completely changed. The pricing plays around with OS security updates which are included for just one year with the starter and unleashed licenses. The Lifetime, with everything unlimited, OS updates too goes for 249$. 249$ is the price of a used 2 bay Synology, or a new J series 2 bay Synology, which includes all software
Transfer of files is to the cache (SSD) then to the hard drives at a later times. When reading from the hard drives it maxes my 1g network. Haven't tested higher speed networks. Lower power usage is a plus, hard drive only run when they are needed.
I rarely comment on RU-vid, but I just have to say , Nice Job. I'll 100% be watching your other vids. This seems like exactly what I need. Not worried about speed. Just want a place to sync my QNAP to and have a bunch of random HHDs and SSDs. The PC ITX box is half decent 5 years ago so it should be good for VMs I also want to run. Thanks Mate!
Unraid is fantastic, especially for a home server you're cobbling together with random parts. My first server I started with lower capacity hard drives (few 6TB hdd). When I needed more space, I bought a larger hdd and replaced the parity disk with it. I then moved the old parity drive into the array. I've been doing that until I got to 14TB parity drive. From here I'm just adding drives directly to the array. I'm now building a second system out of spare parts and looked at some alternatives such as TrueNAS. However I keep coming back to Unraid due to it's flexibility and ease of use. Yea you gotta pay but it's not much for a basic license and you can upgrade as you go.
Another option. For Windows based users is Drivepool its cheaper and does the drive pooling which can be expanded at will and you have options for duplicating data on a schedule. it doesn't have parity but it writes files to one disk at a time swapping drives each time spreading them across the drives in that fashion like Unraid. If you remove a drive all the files on that disk are copied to the other drives during the removal procces and are still there and readable by anything that can access Fat32/NTFS. Drivepool also has caching aswell. Now Unraid obviously has many additional functions and is more efficient and better performance but if all you want is a file server. Personally i like the idea of Unraid and used it in the past on older systems but for some reason my hardware is locked so i can't test it out on either of my systems and tho it detects my onboard 1Gb standard intel network it wont connect to the internet at all. Also i'd be in the Tier 2 price which i can't justify. TrueNas Core is great in theory but in my case it's hit and miss with my Marvell based 10Gbe network cards and the pools keep dissapearing and or permissions keep denying access.to my windows main pc.
I have tried to setup windows drivepool multiple times and while testing disk failures every single time I was unable to recover data. Was a weird experience for me because it’s not complicated to set up but for the life of me not once did it do anything but become unusable.
Nice try but your list is a little flaky but do keep up the good work :) but here is some in sight from someone use uses it daily for a few years now: 1. performance: i use a 2TB SSD Cache and can hammer it for a long time on 10gb and then eventually it starts slowing down when cache is full and auto clears every hour if you set it / 2. user friendly:: its more user friendly then truenas like for example setting up shares, users and sharing data with them/ 3. Raid: you cant truly EVER lose all your data as even if you have 1 parity and lose 3/20 drives you will only lose the data of those 3 drives as the files are kept in full on each drive so you can just mount the failed drives to the same server or another one and migrate the data out as long as they are not 100% dead but even then recovery is VERY likely possible as data is not striped. / 4. DISKS Sizes: Mix and match freely as long as the biggest disk is the parity / 5. Independent: You can transfer all the parts to a complety different machine, different cpu, different sata or raid cards, you can swap raid cards as you see fit as long as they in IT mode and it does not care what so ever pr from raid card to direct sata / 6. Flexibility: you want to add disks, stop raid ad disk start raid. you wand to shrink the raid by removing disk or disks? move data out of disk or disks, stop raid start new config from menu, un-select the disk you dont want and start raid and done . you want to replace disk with bigger then drop raid and select disk to replace it and start raid and done. / 7. VM (passthrough): I assume you never watched the earlier LTT Videos like 7 gamers 1 pcu or something like that but you can pass hardware even usb, sound or anything else directly to a VM and so you could put in 2-3+ graphic cards and technically have 2-3+ people use 1 pc but run 2-3 separate environments with they screen keyboard and mouse, heaphones as if they were truly separate computers as long as you have enough PC/RAM to go around. 8. USB/OS Rebuild: very eazy as you back up data to cloud or other places and then you just copy the data and overwrite a newly made unraid usb stick /9. Docker: i use syncthing to back up the appdata folder to another device so rebuild is decently simple // I my self have been using Synology for over 10 years. i have 2 8 bay synolology's, I also have few 4-12bay rack qnap servers but all of those have slowly become secondary to my Unraid Servers which are 4-20BAY with mixed disks 12-16TB and the branded NAS all except a single 8 bay Synology have been shelved in the last few years and come out once in a while when I want to try something
Thank you for these brilliant additional input bud. I might roll out an article off the back of this video and will be unsure to factor these points in. When I do, I'll be sure to ref/credit you (your YT handle or a different site/url back link?). Have a lovely weekend man
I agree with DeNNii iABLE for the most part. Yes the cache is a huge benefit for transfering to UnRAID, but that is only sending data to UnRAID or while data is still on the cache drive. Once the mover runs and puts the data on the array you are limited to the speed of a single drive to pull the data back. I do not believe UnRAID is or should be used in an enterprise environment. It may not even be suited for all home lab/users. UnRAID is a great archival server for data not needed regularly or a backup. UnRAID is the best choice for a media server hands down. A single drive can handle multiple videos being played at a single time. You can use any size drive equal to or smaller than the parity drive while getting 100% of the drive capacity. The parity drive can be upgraded to a bigger drive at anytime. With the risk a drive may fail during the rebuild, but again you only lose the data on that drive. You can add a second parity drive at any time. Parity checks can be scheduled to run on a regular bases to prevent bit rot. Yes UnRAID is not free, but neither are the other options. TrueNas has an enterprise side they sell hardware to provide revenue to fund software development. TruNas core/scale is provided free to use on your hardware but it is also their beta platform to roll out updates/changes before providing the enterprise side. Synology, Qnap, etc you pay for overpriced hardware to fund their software. Look at Synology the DS423+ was recently released it's using a four year old CPU. I'm willing to bet manufacturing cost is less than $200 but MSRP is $500. I was a Synology user for years and loved it. I think their price to performance is awful, but yes I would recommend one to a low technical person for a turnkey nas.
For me, the most important feature of UnRaid is that every drive is completely self-contained. In the case of a major failure, you can remove individual drives and plug them into another computer and retrieve all the files stored on those drives. In most RAID systems, the data on individual drives is not usable without all the other drives. It is also very easy to set up dual-parity with UnRaid, which allows for the failure of any two drives simultaneously. This is very comforting when you have a drive failure and have to replace and rebuild a drive - with only single parity, if another drive fails during the rebuild process, you will lose data. Dual-parity keeps you protected while replacing a failed drive. Again, if MORE than two drives fail at once, all of the data on the functioning drives is still retrievable. I have lost two other RAID arrays in the past due to hardware failures and lost everything. I don't want to go through that ever again.
@@ExodusX13 The first time was with the original Drobo, right after they came out. I never figured out what happened. The second time was with Windows Home Server. There was a bug at some point that resulted in all drives connected to a single port expander being given the same serial number - Windows got confused and wrote data to the incorrect drives. In both cases, all of the drives were fine, just the data ended up scrambled (and therefore unrecoverable). At the time of those instances, I had no ability to back up the amount data I was storing. These days, anything irreplaceable is backed up to a cloud service. The remainder is replaceable but would take hundreds or thousands of hours of work. I don't have any practical/affordable way to back up the full 80 TB. Using UnRaid, if I lose more than 2 drives, I only lose the data on the failed drives. This is a much easier recovery job than replacing everything. If I lose the entire server (due to fire, flood, etc.), then I have bigger problems than how much effort it will take to replace the data. I'm essentially self-insuring the replaceable data.
I tried unraid I really like it, its simple to use and runs fast, I run my own media server, well I tried truenas scale thats great but I cant gte sonarr to import my tv shows when downloaded on unraid it works just fine and did not take long to setup, I wish there would be an option to install to a hard drive, the only thing which really is stopping me from pulling the trigger is this 1 year of updates if I am going to spend $50 on 1 year I would expect to get security updates after the one year, paying $250 is not an option its way too much for what it is.
250 is not too much. Youre crazy. If you factor the cost of 4k movie sets or theatre tickets over the next 2 or 3 years, that 250 literally looks like a drop in the bucket with how much you can store using unraid. This doesnt even include other features you would NEVER recieve from physical discs or movie tickets. I dont think movie tickets can store movies, pictures, software etc. Doesnt matter how many movie tickets or 4k box sets releases you buy. They will never store your information. The value of a 250 license is insane. I cant even find any drawbacks besides being stupid and not buying it faster. Once this gets more popular that 250 lifetime license will dissappear or go up. With the former being most likely.
1 - massive benefit to unraid is you can pass through nearly any disk format within a few clicks of the ui. This is a massive benefit if you have disks with data on it already. I think the best setup is to have a small node with unraid for apps/ external drives then a proper nas as data storage.
@@nikhilkhandelwal8863 I was curious too, then found this on the unRaid website Did you know that you can extend the 30 day free trial of Unraid? Hardware can be ill-suited. Things break. Life happens. We get it. To try out Unraid a little longer, once your original trial shows "expired" in the upper left of the header, Stop the array. Next, go to the Tools → Registration page, and now a button shows up where you can click for a 15 day extension. Please remember that you are only allotted up to two extensions, each for two weeks. No further extensions can be issued thereafter. Note: You cannot change the USB flash device for Unraid Trials if you wish to continue where you left off.
You are right, initial setup of the disks and figuring out what the heck is going on with the preclear/parity check is annoying to a first time user. I stumbled thru the setup on old hardware, then built a fast new multithreaded server with the 3) 8tb ironwolf and a 1tb wd as a cache drive
the way unraid stores its data and accesses them one at a time (vs traditional raid) was one of my main reasons for going with it. I liked that you could still have dual parity but if something crazy happens and a third drive dies before you can replace the first two then you only lose the data on that one drive. For a media server its pretty perfect at least for my use case. I have 4 or 5 streams max going at once and never have any issues. It saturates my 1gb network regardless even when writing directly to the array over the network since i dont write to cache drives.
Unraid is very resource friendly. However, ZFS is not. Do your homework on zfs if your switching to unraid for zfs. ZFS requires a lot of ram unless something changed that I'm not aware about
Correction: the OS is stored, and loaded into memory from a USB stick. the OS runs on the memory of the system. your registration key is also tied to the UUID of the USB stick so if the stick dies, you need to re-register your new stick. it can take 20 seconds to a couple hours to receive your new key. These days its usually in the seconds range, but there is a limit to how many re-registers per year before you need to contact support, which could be from hours to the next day. I run unraid. this is not usually an issue unless you buy crap usb sticks.
@@OShackHennessy My USB stick died the other day again. I might be on my 5th or 6th USB stick in 5 or 6 years. I've tried multiple different brands, with and without flashing LEDs. Some people feel the ones without LEDs last longer...
@@TristynRusselo They die like flies. I stopped using them for anything else beside clean Windows installs and reapplying my OSs. Either their quality went down tremendously, or we are doing something wrong.
If using ZFS can you still mix and match drives without losing space? Or does it have to be BTRFS? This is one of the most important features to me when choosing NAS software.
For the transfer speed and performance, should I be worried if I'm only using sata SSD for storage and Nvme for the system/minecraft/docker...? Because in the future I intend to have something capable to do at once 3 or 4 jellyfin steam, a surveillance system recording in a loop and a minecraft server.... so lots of reads and writes
Disk speed performance - old default array using xfs or btrfs, yes disk speeds suck now, using BTRFS pools on SSDs/nVMEs with raid configs you get raid speeds and even newer... using ZFS pools... you get ZFS speeds.
good to know all these, thank you. when you are saying about the 3 options to pay for the software and you say "interfaces", what does that mean? actual disks inside ONE nas or separate computers acting as a NAS with whatever storage each?
Yes it's true unrated requires it to boot off a USB but once booted it runs off RAM and I like unraid for what they offer apps good documentation online space later one is one person that you can go to
After playing around with Unraid the biggest problem is it's slow. Yes you can speed some things up by using a cache disk or disks but if you are moving large datasets around a 10G network it's pretty terrible. For 1-2.5g networks though it's not bad if you don't want to DIY something with mergefs and SnapRAID. It's kind of like buying into Synology if you make an informed choice you will probably be happy with it so long as what you are doing is within what it's meant to do.
@@ultravioletiris6241 If you mean something off the shelf there are other questions that would need answering as well. How many disks do you want it to support and what kind of budget for instance. Realistically any NAS would work, question is what kind of speeds will you see and what kind of speeds are you looking for.
Great review. Not very serious cons, I think. ARM support and a single account are very specific problems. Learning curve, we have youtube :) And I'm fine supporting if if I'll use it. My only worry is the transfer speed. How bad is it really gonna be?
I setup an SSD cache in my unraid server (using an old quad-core PC that still has a Windows Vista sticker on it), so ingest data isn't an issue unless I dump more data than the SSD can hold. I mainly use mine as a Jellyfin server and don't have any issues streaming 4k movies off of it. If you're planning on using your server for more IO heavy tasks however, you'll be limited to the read/write speeds of whatever hard drive you're accessing
I get 90-95 MB/s when I transfer a 10 gig test file to the array (spinning rust). Wish I could test the SSD cache pools but I don't have another computer with 10GBe networking so no point really.
Maybe it’s the name, UnRaid, or the tiny USB you keep holding up, I am not sure what the heck this is. Is this a little tiny portable program introduced by a tiny USB to transform whatever it plugs into a NAS hub that can do all the things you commonly reference with Synology/Qnap/WD like Plex, file sharing, etc.? And if that’s what it is, then why would anyone choose the very expensive fully loaded boxes if they can chintz with an old laptop, or G-Drive, or any cheaper external SDD or HD?
You just answered your own question. Im not IT, but it seems that both have their own use cases, and as we progress in the storage/network world, we will find newer and more efficient + safe ways to store data. For the cost, it seems like unraid beats most of raid setups. There are risks of course.
Wait.. There is an All black 4 bay Qnap? {lower left in vid} I had to settle for an ugly white and blue stripped version. Totally throws off my black and grey motive for my shelf area for Nas/router/modem/switch. Now I have to look up that model #.
for everyone in europe, keep in mind; these guys are doing big-time tax-evasion. so since police can't catch unraid, it's up to you to pay tax on top on your own.
you can now use zfs if you want to but like you said it is still in release candidate V6.12.0-rc6 as of today but soon maybe few weeks to a few months then it will have the "stable" version V6.12.0 you can make pools like raidz raidz2 raidz3 ect, but some of the more advanced features of zfs will be added later in version V6.13.0 maybe i'm looking forward to version 6.14.0 or V6.15.0 when they add multiable Unraid arrays i hope anyways.😎JP
I tried this due to my experimentation with different NAS systems. I use a QNAP, but have interest in TrueNAS, UnRAID, Promox and others . So far Truenas is OK, but the VM part is lacking. Proxmox has the best (in my opinion), logon from the web so users can operate from the web. My only problem, is I can't get solaris 10 to find the NIC. However Unraid, doesn't look like it will easy for normal everyday users. I dumped it. Maybe later if it gets better and I can boot off an SSD.......
FreeNAS is now called TrueNAS, and by the looks of it, Unraid has it beat on every front? That said, if the main argument was the file system, and as Unraid now offers this, then I don't see any advantage in running TrueNAS over Unraid personally.
I take this back... After testing Unraid for the past couple of weeks, and even purchased a license to conclude my evaluation, I would say is not suitable for production. That said, the software seems riddled with bugs, starting with the installer, and all of the way down to the modules such as docker and vm's. And so while the interface is certainly intuitive, it remains the stability remains a major issue. Such as vm's and docker images disappearing from their respective panels, as with permission and windows access issues, only to conclude with endless community posts in-search of answers. That said, I've compiled a list of issues with the current(stable) release, since the start of my tests, and concluded that Unraid simply cannot be used for anything other than hobbyist use - thus leading me to question why anyone would pay for software, without any actual support, and moreso, where there are far more reliable options available to get the job done.
@@SmalltimR I don't know what rubbish you did to make it unstable. But I've been running the same Unraid install across 3 major versions with every single drive having been replaced/upgraded with zero data loss for 4 years. Zero data corruption with 29 TBs currently utilized. 25 dockers and 1 vm running hassos with zero issues of 'disappearing'. I wouldn't run it in a data center obviously but it beats the pants off of every other non-enterprise solution.
I am testing unraid since 4 days on a 3900X AMD system with only NVMe and 10Gbe network card. At the moment it there are only 2 x 4TB NVme after purchasing, I wanted add 4 x 4TB NVMe. At the same time, I have 2 x qnap nas and 1x proxmox server at home, so right now I I would say at the moment I am not convinced yet from unraid, since I also had stability issues. uSB flash disappeared once and also I needed reset 2 x times because of unknown issues. And the speed (without parity) only with nvme is max 600MB/s which is not satisfying at all even with a 12 core CPU and fresh installation. For every small action I need a plug in, there is absolutely nothing in the OS integrated. QuTS hero or just QTS is much more better. I wanted with unraid just a powerful server for high speed transfer and enough power for virtual machines. Better may be to use just a simple Linux distribution we will see, I hope I will change my mind and will like this unraid soon..
Yet loads of people say that since your license is on the USB, if the USB overheats or whatever, your server will crash. I don't really mind having the license on there, but not being able to boot from a SSD in 2023 is just stupid.
After trying our Unraid for several weeks, I have come to the conclusion that it cannot be recommended for anything other than home use and none critical applications
