I've been using unraid since 2017, the main reason for my using it was being able to slowly grow my storage over time instead of needing to buy drives in batches.
I agree. I started using unraid in 2020. started with 4x8tb drives now I have close to 150TB of storage. I usually buy 2 of the biggest drives I am willing to buy at the time, 1 becomes my new parity drive and the other becomes extra storage, with the old parity drive getting added to the pool. I recently added a 2nd parity drive as I have seem to settle on Seagate EXOS 18tb drives.
Me, since 2011 - and still using my original Lexar Firefly USB sticks (I have more than one licence). Unraid has to be one of the better decisions that I have made over the years.
A pro tip: since the license is linked to the USB drive serial number, get a good quality USB drive or even better a known-brand SDcard reader (it will use the serial of the reader, so even if the SDcard dies you don't need to call support to ask a license transfer)
Another option is to use a NVMe case and stick a drive in it, SD cards aren't very reliably. I have some low capacity 128gb NVMe drives from dead machine that are perfect for something like this. FYI, I've never used unraid, just ranting about SD cards...
This is why I use Sandisk Ultrafit drives...tiny and not hanging out and risk getting damaged from "routine" maintenance and having to move the server about
When you start using Unraid you have to throw away some preconceptions about how things work with other systems. Once you learn the tricks, it becomes more apparent. Passing through a gpu to a VM or Docker, you have to install the driver (add the nvidia runtime plugin) and then also use the serial number of the card given by the plugin. Passing through a GPU to a VM isn't as hard as it seems either, if you have a motherboard with an onboard graphics (or cpu graphics) you can boot on that so the system itself has something, and then you pass through the (additional) GPU you installed separately itself, which is why IOMMU is so important. Up until the driver plugins were released it was a LOT harder. I have 4 unraid servers, 1 is a 48 bay 200+TB slicestor 1440 with a 32core EPYC server board with 8tb NVMe, 256 gb ram, and a P2000 for Plex. It's a monster and runs great. Another mITX 5TB of all-nvme storage AMD 3400g "test" server, one with a 6600K and 8 bays, and another 12-bay with an AMD 3900x, 6tb nvme, with nvidia P400 card. Two of those servers run on 10Gbit, 1 on 2.5, and the others on 1gbit. Pooling NICs is done in the software, not hardware. Nvidia, Intel, and AMD have different requirements to pass through GPU acceleration for Plex/Emby, but I actually have gotten it working with all combinations: Quicksync on the 6600k, AMD's gpu acceleration (yes, it does work), and 2 boxes using Nvidia. I will say: EMBY was a pain getting acceleration going. Plex is much easier. I have learned a LOT about Linux from Unraid, and I'm a Windows admin by day. I knew just enough to be dangerous with Linux before Unraid. Hint: Support configuration for HW accelleration depends on your video card type, and the nomenclature to access it is different. Nvidia: driver install, go to plugins, find the nvidia driver, and find the GPU-#### string, copy that and that is your "nvidia visible devices" number you need to paste in the docker (you may need to add it the Container variable NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES on Emby), and then use the --runtime=nvidia flag and restart the docker. That should fix your problem (it does with Plex). I gave up on Emby because it's still not quite user friendly to me on the encoding side. To get AMD and Intel quicksync working with Plex (and presumably Emby), you use a different flag: --device=\dev\dri, and you have to install the appropriate driver for the platform (Intel vs AMD vs Nvidia drivers), and create a device entry in the docker as well with a value that points to that "\dev\dri" even though you have it as a runtime option, you have to create the device for the runtime option to use. I think there's also another one instead of \dev\dri it's \dev enderD128 that works (or worked in the past, I don't use Emby so I can't remember what one I used to get it to work). I was like you at the beginning, but after I did my research and played around with it, I was able to figure these things out and started treating Unraid like more of a compartmentalized system, and so passing hardware through is one of the most difficult things at first because you have to think of the OS it boots on, the dockers, and the VMs, and drivers/plugins being all separate entities from each other, and getting them talking is the part that gets people confused. Remember that Plugins will work whether docker or VMs are running or not (that's why drivers are plugins). I'm now a few years in and still learning all sorts of things as I go. Yes, Docker & VM snapshot/backup is done via CA plugins. CA = Community Applications, Dynamix = that refers to UNRAID themselves. Look into the following apps: Scrutiny, Unassigned Devices (THIS IS A MUST HAVE), Appdata Backup, and Netdata, and any of the CA & Dynamix plugins that may apply to you. BTW, as someone else has mentioned, go back and look at 9:09 and realize your mistake is there to see.
i did read this whole big ass comment. checked unassigned devices app as you recommended. never thought i would be so god damn thankful for stumbling upon this
19:00 yeah I agree with that, rather than having to add extra parameters, a checkbox to enable GPU passthrough in containers would be super convienent.
I don't think Truenas is even aware there is a competition on for their commercial clients from Unraid? If anything they seem to try and funnel those with a certain mentality away from ZFS and to Unraid (I have a bunch of drives of different sizes.....). And the appliance nature of Truenas set it and Proxmox in very different camps as well (eg one can be utterly ruined if your APT sources are incorrect while the other ignores the fact that you even edited said sources). To see them as competing against one another is to miss that there is a more correct tool for most jobs being performed by a specific person. PS True Charts over on Truenas is a completely dodgy non-official thing, so no monopoly on poorly supported community apps on both systems, lol.
I just meant scope of the product. I have an UNRAID box at home, ran infrastructure on Proxmox at work and had client who used TrueNAS for their storage. They all have their place and purpose, and do have some overlap but people should play to each ones strengths.
Proxmox is much easier to get GPU pass thru, or any pcie/usb peripherals to work vs trueNAS and unraid. But yeah, feels bolted on for sure, like a throwaway feature. Vms with scale feel the exact same way.
Cannot wait for all the upcoming unRaid tutorials. As a user of unRaid for a couple years now, I've not been able to find a use case that unRaid cannot fulfill. Excited to see your progress!
This is the type of content that makes the homelab community better. The good, the bad, the ugly. Been using unraid for a couple years now and love it. Also running a Proxmox server for my business for physical separation. Strengths and weaknesses in both, but great for my needs! Thank you for insights!
thank you for giving us the all in first time experience, successes plus failures and everything; it's not only me learning things the hard way. this is honestly quite helpful
Hi! I made the bbergle-jellyfin template! I made it because I could never get hardware transcoding working with any other template. I suggest trying to download that container and try again! It should work lol.
Might be a good idea to change the title to nVid Jellyfin, so it's more informative. But thanks for doing this, if not for this comment, I would have passed it up myself. Now I can try it out.
The biggest thing that Unraid does (and you didn't mention) is that it has the ability to add drives to the array at a later time, without having to backup/reformat/recreate the array. If you "preclear" the drive before you add it and format it, you don't even need to do a parity rebuild. The other thing is that these drives are not being striped. Every file is intact on a given drive. It's literally JBOD with parity.
That's not true. The description of how you increase your parity drive size is quite clear in, "The Parity Swap Procedure," chapter in the Unraid manual. Parity data is transferred to the new, larger disk, then the old parity is zeroed, then the data is shuffled to the old parity disk, etc... So, yes, you absolutely are recreating, formatting, as well as having always been limited by the size of your parity disk(s) with regard to how many data disks you can actually use and still have redundancy. You can't just add data disks however way or size you want at any time and it will work, not sure why every Unraid user thinks that is the case, but it does seem like a common...well, belief.
@@LackofFaithify If you work within the constraints, of which UNRAID does a decent job of advertising, it works exactly as the OP says. If you plug in a new disk, and the next step from the user is to wait some time and then use the disk... then what difference does it make what means to an end the OS used?
An other thing that new UNRAID users don't understand is that the Array is not a "true" RAID. The RAID is not done at the block level but at the files level. You have 1 or 2 parity disks. The other disks are formatted with XFS. The file system can be striped across disk so if you have a movie that movie will live only on one disk with a parity. the nice thing about this is that you can take an UNRAID disk out the server and mount it under any linux distro and the files that are on that disk are still accessible. Because files are only on a single disk this only gives you single disk read performance. Cache SSD disks are used to speed up writes. again this is a single disk SSD write performance. As long as the file is on the cache disk you will have higher performance. but once the disk is moved to DISK array you will be on the slower spinning disk performance.
I run an Ubuntu server vm in unraid. Whatever I don't want to do or can't do in unraid I simply do in the linux server vm. This pretty much handles all my homelab needs. And I used your Ubuntu server tutorial to setup that vm.
You had one mistake that I saw. When you were trying to connect to Movies, you typed in UNRAD, and not UNRAID. Typo is the reason you were not able to get in.
Really like to see this. I did suggest you try unraid in one of your recent videos. Your opinion mostly matches my own. I keep a server running proxmox for VMs but I love my Unraid server for all my media & miscellaneous NAS storage. Its where all of my set and forget homelab stuff lives. Tinkering takes place somewhere else
Thanks for sharing your experience. I've been running Unraid for a long time now, and I even have it in different remote locations, to do my backup and etc. Like most of your videos, I also tried Truenas, but unraid gives me the flexibility of upgrading my drives (as long as my parity is bigger than my upgrades). With truenas my experience of having all drives the same, feels like I am stuck with the drives, unless I have to upgrade, then I upgrade all the drives to be the same. Oh well, thanks for the demo and video, have a great memorial weekend.
I'm a big fan of your work and have been following many of your videos. You're an excellent teacher, and your informative videos have been extremely helpful to me and others. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.
*waits to see what happens when he gets to passing through the GPU*. Basically you have to hit the "Advanced View" toggle in the container config, add --runtime=nvidia to the "Extra Parameters" section, add NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES key with value of the gpu identifier, and add NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES key with value "all" or "compute" (don't include quotes). After that things should pass through just fine. Then you can go to the container's console and do a nvidia-smi to confirm. The downside to using GPU in containers is that if you try to pass through that same GPU to a VM while containers are using it the system can lock up due to fighting for resources. So each time you want to use a VM that uses that GPU you will have to remove the --runtime=nvidia parameter from each container before booting up the VM. Unless you have more than one GPU of course.
Couple of months ago, I also got into unraid. I was standing between truenas scale with zfs and unraid with xfs for a successor of my virtualized storage which was hosted in a proxmox VM with openmediavault as os and snapraid as parity. I went with unraid because of the spindown of HDDs. I didn't want to discard proxmox, so I virtualized unraid in proxmox. Just create a VM without a hard disk and passthrough the stick. Works very well.
One thing to keep in mind is that unraid does not checksum files or blocks. so data corruption can still happen and it will not get noticed until you see the corruption yourself by which point it would be too late. This is not a problem with zfs which checksums blocks so when data corruption gets detected the corrupted block will get replaced by the parity
That's isn't some special feature. Literally every os will do that, but most with a nas will disable it as drives that stay spun up last longer than drives that are constantly starting and stopping Think highway miles vs city miles in a car
UnRaid typically saves more power than traditional RAID arrays. It allows for mixed drive sizes and selective spin-down of unused drives, reducing energy consumption. Traditional RAID often requires all drives to be active, even when not in use, leading to higher power usage.
@@josephp1592 it is very special in unraid and one of the main reason i use it. In unraid just the disk you read from are activ, all other sleep. if you write just the one you write on and the parity disk(s) are running. So i save a big amount of power. when all disks are running with operations or such stuff, i am using close to 200W with everything else in my homelab, when it is in idle or just one drive running, i am just a bit over 100W and this with a 130 Tb array, opnsense box, a second unraid box on a intel nuc, switch, ap, synology offline and truenas scale server offline. My Truenas Scale server sip alone about 200W with 16x16Tb drives even when he do nothing. There are setups with 15-20W idle with maybe 8 Drives or even more, but i can't reach this as i use 10 gbit and other things and this holding back lower c-states.
Word on the street is that a lot of the shortcomings of the hypervisor side of things will be getting fixed in 6.12.13 which is currently in Beta testing for community developers. I don't know what all is coming but a big one I know of is snapshots. I think they're also making it so that having an array isn't a requirement to create other pools. Currently you have to have at least 1 drive in the primary array. I've been using unraid for probably 6-8 years now and I love it and tinker with it every day. It is fun seeing someone completely new checking it out for the first time. There's a lot of stuff that was a learning curve for me too that now I take for granted so this was a fun video to watch to see how a newcomer sees it.
So uhh, last time I checked (a couple months ago), SSDs are not recommended for array drives because the array does NOT support TRIM. You instead want to use a Pool, where you can use ZFS. The issue is that Unraid will not work without a single device in the array. The people that do this kind of setup either put a single virtual hard disk (if Unraid is virtualized), or a USB drive or some such as a single device in the array and everything else in a pool. edit: Please stop coming in here and replying that version 7 is different. I probably knew before you did, but this post was before that was public.
my practice has been to use 1 fast ssd for array (no parity) and use that as a caching solution for my BIG zfs pools. network transfers writes to array (NVME) -> mover passes it to zfs pool (spinning drives) as scheduled. hopefully unraid will allow using pools as cache for other pools in the future.
Correct, you don't want SSD's in the aray! There are SOME SSD's that have trim built into them so that isn't a problem, finding out what SSDs that have that can be a nightmare in my experience and putting the drives in a pool is so much easier anyway and serves the same purpose.
@@davidusi27 That is not what caching means in ZFS. You have a SLOG which is for Asynchronous writes and L2ARC which is a read cache that you don't even think about until you have your system memory maxed out. There is also a metadata cache, but you spit in the eye of the Fates and gods and demons and all mankind if you only use a single SSD for that and you will get what is due to you. And for anyone that is setting up an all SSD/NVME pool for ZFS and use hba of certain gens: if your drives do not support read zero after trim, do not do it.
Nice video. Unraid user since 2011 here - but I watched this because you can always learn something new. Take a look at the Disk Location plugin of you need to monitor hours used and other data in your Storinator setup.
Great take on Unraid! I really appreciate that you recognized the target user/use case for it and didn't bash on it because it didn't have all the "enterprise" features. A great follow up video would be testing out the ZFS implementation. I love the snapshot/replication ZFS adds.
I moved from an ESXi server with multiple VMs running various services, to UNRAID running all of those services either natively (file) or docker (web, plex, cloudflare, arrs, etc). It has been set-it-and-forget-it for almost two months for me. I'm glad VMware got rid of the free ESXi version when I was ready to upgrade and I caught the old pricing for UNRAID before it ended. Oh, and I can also create any VMs I want to test for various OSes. It's really a great home solution and added storage redundancy I didn't have before. Docker makes updating things so easy and other than slow listings for folders with 10k+ files, I've found no other faults.
Agreed, it's a far better Docker host than it is a hypervisor - running full VMs on it hasn't even been a thought it's so far on my "no" list. If full VMs are desired then Proxmox is the obvious choice
@@ewenchan1239just cuz you can doesn't mean you should when there are more readily available turnkey solutions that are designed for that. I can use a flat head screwdriver in a philips screw head but it doesn't mean I should if there's a philips screwdriver available. People have different philosophies and use cases, but from a security standpoint, exposing unnecessary services like SMB/CIFS/NFS on your hypervisor directly isn't ideal, bind mounts via LXC container are a bit better but imo still kinda dumb, and running a TrueNAS VM with disk passthrough in Proxmox is most ideal but unless you really need to save cash to consolidate tech, best to let your Hypervisor run your apps and keep the NAS/File Server separate
i'm going to use Unraid as a hypervisor and you can't stop me but seriously, if you're just a home user then it's good enough, but i wouldn't use it in production i only have 3 VMs, 2 are applications that don't have docker containers, and the third is opnsense after i got tired of my router and it was the fastest solution
I have been using UNRaid for years, playing with the options but only using it as a NAS, no VM's, no containers. I just need it for Network file storage. Thanks for the video review!
It may not be the ideal product for everyone, but it’s the ideal OS for my Lab. I appreciate you taking a look at Unraid and your transparency. Honest coverage like yours is essential for the OS to develop. I’ve been a fan of Unraid for a while now and the devs definitely respond to feedback.
Its nice to see reviews of unraid and proxmox as those are two systems currently using. I had recently moved my compute works loads off of unraid to proxmox cluster with ceph. I also ran into setting up 3rd party backups that more complicated then it needed to be. Maintenance would end up shutting down any compute workloads if those workloads didn't support HA/Clustering themselves. I continue to use Unraid for my NAS solution mainly for power savings shutting down disks.I look forward to seeing more about your proxmox adventures!
Great video about Unraid, I just started with Unraid earlier this year myself after using a Pi4 for many many years. I now have a lot more flexibility running containers and VM's without slowing my headless machine down!
Great video Tim. I'm currently running the Unraid Beta 6.13 with ZFS and Intel Arc support. It's pretty good. If you're looking at Unraid as a potential candidate, but want to utilize something you're more familiar with like ZFS, it's a beta option!
I wish you had made this video 3 years ago. I have since moved on from unraid, and yet to look back. As a NAS it is great - it worked flawlessly as a file server. I find that it is missing features I want. and hides features it has behind propriatary jargon. These days I am happily building and securing my homelab on a real linux server. Personally I would recommend Unraid to people who only ever want a file server, but for anybody else I recommend other systems.
I've never used Unraid but from what you showed here I think it provides a really nice user experience as a NAS system, so a serious contender for TrueNAS. As you said, the "extras" (CSI containers + VMs) seems to be missing the monitoring but then again the configuration (drivers and options) are still a bit of a mixed bag, especially regarding backups. I was missing something regarding "high availability", can you even cluster two Unraid installations? An interesting insight, as ever. Thanks Tim.
Few things, Unraid is great for people on a budget who upgrade or add drives as its needed as you can just take the array down and add another and it just works. and when ti comes to the USB drive Unraid loads from USB into RAM and runs from there only writing changes made to the USB as to help keep from wearing the USB drive prematurely.
I got unraid for free from a friend when I was a beginner homelabber. It was my first server OS. Seemed quite appealing having a GUI for everything as a newbie. Set up the basics (kinda like seen in the video) but always kept hitting walls that stopped me from what I wanted to do. Most guides leading me into the terminal anyways. I definitely wouldn’t recommend unraid to anyone. Even though it’s a good starting point, the ui becomes redundant after a while when getting into more advanced tasks. I’m not familiar with the storage structure unraid has so it is not a point of consideration in my review. This is purely from a plugin/docker/vm standpoint. Though I’d probably recommend truenas over unraid for storage as well solely based on cost.
2:04 your license is tied to the physical thumb drive via serial number! Backing up your config is great, but if the drive dies you have to jump through hoops to use a different thumb drive. Last I used it they only allowed a single license transfer in 12 months. So also buy a high quality drive! The metal Samsung BAR Plus is highly reviewed.
One of us! One of us!!! Cool....definitely going to be liking seeing your "howto's" on UnRaid like Space Invader One and the like, once you get comfortable with it and start tinkering..plus your constructive critisizm might get more "features" built into the apps that are lacking (like your mentioned "metrics" for the docker containers [there may be an app for that though]) You will be amazed at how much there is...tons of CA (community apps ;) ) to poke thru Keep em coming!!!!
*Now that unraid has also succumbed to greed and massively increased its prices, the license is too expensive. It's interesting to note that despite the high prices, Unraid still lives from community support, all of whom work for unraid free of charge.*
@@sidbrun_ Unraid uses 99% open-source and essentially just programs the user interface. But the *support and the testing* is done almost entirely by the community - for free, in their spare time.
ah yes, I love the shades 😎 - I have an unRAID box with all NVMEs myself but it's not a ""production"" server and its there for a few things - it's a neat OS, and the community is pretty helpful
TrueNAS is great as well. It really comes down to your use-case and what you want to accomplish. If data integrity is the most important thing, then ZFS is the clear choice. ZFS on Unraid is a thing, but I wouldn't call it fully robust yet. Unraid really prides itself by being able to add single drives, of any size, at any time. Even if you need a bigger parity drive, that's easy to do too.
Also on truenas - but think they went a bit ambitious with Kubernetes and not docker , but i guess enterprise is where theyre gonna get the $$ they think. But put a debian vm in the hypervisor of truenas and make it the docker app host instead of trying to learn the Kubernetes truecharts is a bit easier for a beginner
If you build it for dedicated plex server like myself, I can not say yes enough. The community apps with the YT vid walk throughs and the forums are very detailed and honestly easy to configure and setup. I myself am new to Unraid but got the hang of it pretty fast.
There's a lot of plugins that should be default in unraid by now. Things like appdata backup, community applications, fix common problems, nerd tools, unassigned devices, quite a few of the dynamix plugins, ca auto update. One of the biggest benefits for me is the notifications and update of all plugins and containers. The other is that most configurations work and it notifies you if there is a conflict (such as a port). To this day I still don't know how to do port mappings and volume mappings from scratch. Nor do I want to know, so unraid is perfect.
I use and love Unraid. But I agree with everything you said. A lot needs to be improved. Luckily with the upcoming release of Unraid 7. Some of what you have pointed out are on the way, including vm snapshots. I think the biggest benefit to Unraid in my opinion though is its stability. I've been using it for many years, with insane uptimes, and yet to experience any crash or issues that are a fault of the OS. My flash started to fail and got corrupted once. One day I get a notice saying there was a flash drive error, yet everything, all vm's, dockers, were still up and working fine for days until I could get home. So I flashed the backup to a new flash drive, restarted it and bam, like it never happened.
Unraid is great basic NAS. I have it running as VM on proxmox. I used to have it as hardware install but as my homelab grew I switched to Proxmox. Now it just serves as NAS. The advantage is that you can easily add more disks to it later and only requirement is that the disk you add is smaller or same size as parity drive.
Hey - were you able to get GPU passthrough to containers working on PVE 8.2.2? I've been trying to do this for a while, but have had no luck... Any chance you have a guide for that?
Also, Pro Tip: You can customize the colors beyond just setting dark mode. Settings > Display Settings, there's a few options for custom colors that accepts hex color codes. You can also set a custom header image as well.
Nice video. You’ll be back to proxmox soon 😊. Also don’t use CPU0 on your VMs CPU0 is used by Unraid. You will notice the drives are constantly read/write not stop even if nothing happens on the server..I ran unraid for 6 months on ssds and they reported 10+% wear once I moved them to proxmox. Good luck
Because you didnt understand how it works. Unraid is OS for mehanical drives (of difrens sizes if you whant). SSD/M2 drive are used as cashe drives on unraid as they are not connect to array. It completly difrent use case and you need to see first how it works and how to use it. For example it is good solution for long time storage since you can spin down unused hdds. If you use 2 drives for parity out of 10 for example and 3 hdd dies you dont loose everything, only date on does 3 drives unlike traditional zfs. Problem is speed. You are limited to speed of single hdd because they are used individualy in array.
@@benjiro8793 hm let try to rephrase it this way. And this is my understanding of how it work, im maybe wrong. Protection (Parity) is on top of independent hard disks. So even if parity crash do to much hard drive failure, data on rest of drives are still available to use (if i recall correctly this is for xfs). in setup of 12 drives with 2 drive for parity (1 and 2) if you lose drive 5,7 and 9 for example you lost data only on them and you cannot rebuild your current setup. You need to make new setup (array) and all data on rest on hard disks should be available. In theory. Didnt try it yet, will be soon. Only tryed to simulate that 1 of 2 parity hdd died. Even if you could build new array it should be available by simply putting rest of drives on other pc and access them from any linux. As for problem with ssd it is probably because dockers/vm that reside on array and with every write complete parity need to be recalculated. that why unraid use cache disk and is recommended to move VM/dockers to cache (maybe some docker tried to write some log, there is a way to see what is in use) . With setup like this i set most of drives to spin down with 15min of idle time to not waist power. Only cache ssd are always on.
gotta love Nvidia and their commitment when it comes to linux, think you are blaming Unraid a bit unfairly when it comes to encoding and passthru, same situation on proxmox if you wanna passthru etc Nvidia is the culprit not the platforms
Unraid is at an inflection point. Some of the nice things that were missing may be showing up in the next version. CA is community apps btw. ZFS and btrfs options offer snaps for VMS as well.
For what it's worth, the Jellyfin published server URL is what it shows up as and should match what's setup in your reverse proxy in my experience. Mine is the HTTPS URL with jellyfin as a subdomain, since UA-cam will flag the comment if I put anything URL like.
I've been using Unraid for maybe 7-8 years now. I used to use a Drobo (proprietary device/os) - but it failed and had a terrible experience with that company. I wanted something similar to how DroboFS worked in that I could add drives of different sizes and add new ones without a lot of work. Main use case is for storage (have about 120 TB now - mostly 8TB drives). It also runs the R's for my media collection. My experience is that some stuff is easy, but other parts are hard to find data. I've probably watched every Space Invader One and Ibracorp video in existence! I have a second Unraid server to backup some data in my main Unraid server. Next up on my agenda is to set up a Proxmox server.
There is an "Advanced View" on some of the pages such as the Docker tab that will show off the CPU/Memory usage etc. This Advanced view is also very useful when configuring the Docker container itself
I spent a year running unraid and constantly struggling with nvidia support and passthrough, 16:35 is my experience as well and I gave up and run everything on ubuntu and docker. Unraid makes a great NAS, but trying to run an application server on it in my experience was maddening.
10:17 → I also really like settings. It is very frustrating when a dev/marketing team, of an app without settings, responses: "what do you need settings for and which one do you want" as if they don't know what common settings could be :)
I really like my 1 computer Workstation/Server setup on unRAID. I'm using GPU, SSD, and USB card passthrough. It's like having 2 computers in one, saves electricity and space of having 2 separate computers. I guess you could do this with Proxmox too, but it's so easy with unRAID.
Nice video Tim! and welcome to unraid :) it was neat to see your perspective of unraid. Oh and by the way CA= Community Applications :) maybe in the future you could get to know Ed from spaceinvaderone i think you would make a good guest on the Uncast show' Thanks for sharing the video with us!💖👍😎JP
I'm still in love with zfs. It was a love at first sight. :) Let's get serious, though. One of the things you absolutely have to try with a new storage setup, is to take dd and start filling one of the drives with garbage. Yeah, drives are more likely to slow down and then just fail, bit still... Try it. Last I tried btrfs would not survive this. Zfs would yawn and heal itself with no problem. Curious what unraid would do.
I love UnRaid as a NAS, but have moved all of my docker into a Ubuntu server VM (on UnRaid). Have an XFS array with one ZFS disk in the array. Then I have a separate raidz1 pool, and a ZFS cache-mirror pool. Have a script that makes snapshots of my appdata, etc, that gets sent to the ZFS disk in the array. Works fantastic. But yeah, docker feels tacked on and I prefer it in Ubuntu.
unraid is both incredibly easy to use and frustratingly obtuse to use at the same time. for a media server it's great, for a nas its ok for a vm host.... dear god help me please.
Unraid 7 is going to change the Array system dramatically - the array will be just another pool, it'll support multiple arrays or even zero arrays. VM system also expanding to include snapshots, cloning and other features. 7 is the next release and it's in beta right now. Release supposed to be "coming soon"
Mine server is basically a nas with a hand full of things bolted on (emby, r-stack, nextcloud, minecraft server, photoprism) so unraid works pretty well for all that. The apps part makes setting things up pretty easy as-well, which I liked more as home lab noob.
Great video. Been using unraid for almost a decade now. Interface is not very intuitive indeed and I totally agree with your obvious things it's missing. They seem to have a very little dev team and they are moving slow on updates and features. They did finally add open zfs recently but only parts of it for now. I'm still looking at replacing it with proxmox by visualizing unraid at first to allow me time to learn how to deploy containers on another vm under proxmox
I wouldn't use Unraid for the hypervisor, I'd use it for specifically storage. this is what I think it's most useful for. I'm pretty skeptical of it as a secure solution for the hypervisor. I'd much rather keep it either in a VM hosted on Proxmox ( dedicated Nas for it ) or on a dedicated Nas itself, but not use it as a host.
The best feature of unraid I think is how easy you can change hardware. It really only care about the usb pen and your hdd/ssd’s🤩 I use what i got, and sometimes better equipment pops up. Then I just move to the better hardware and push the power button and I am up and running again😎👌🏻
I suspect I will draw some flack but as you seem to have a 6x 1TB ssd's then no point in cache or parity as that's for when you have a HDD array. Instead I would create a zfs raidz (1 drive fail) or raidz2 (2 drive fail) pool with those 6x 1TB ssd's = 4-5TB pool, also zfs supports ssd trim.
I moved from unraid to proxmox, and I dont miss unraid. I used ibramenu to make my containers templates. The only reason (actually the second reason, the first one is that I also paid for it), that I still have unraid running is because it is a pain to trasnfer the 60+ TB of media I have in unraod array. But it I think it os better than running 20 HDD at once every time I run a moview from a zfs file system. Unraid will only spin up that individual drive.
nvidia keylace patch removes restriction on maximum number of simultaneous NVENC video encoding sessions imposed by Nvidia to consumer-grade GPUs. Its good to be unlocked in unraid when using hardware encoding!
They still have a lifetime license option... Unfortunately, it's the most expensive(and imo, ridiculously priced) license($249USD) -Edit- Clarification: all the licenses are lifetime, they just stop receiving updates after 1yr unless you pay a $36/yr subscription, you can still used it after that year w/o a sub, but they won't provide you any new updates; the $249 lifetime license gets updates as long as Unraid produces updates, without a sub
Under the container creation page, there was a basic mode switch on the top right. Maybe if they moved that to somewhere like the bottom next to the finish button
Your review is well-done but I think you need to dive deeper into unraid. I'm curious whether or not the docker containers are running in the host space or is wrapped in a ghost VM. The problem with Docker and some other container technology is that they use overlay file systems such that if the container makes changes to the filesystem as in logs... that will cause an increase in the number of files and file-space taken. If it's on the host then the entire system could fail and in dramatic fashion.
I've been using unraid since 2017, the main reason for my using it was being able to slowly grow my storage over time instead of needing to buy drives in batches.
I agree. I started using unraid in 2020. started with 4x8tb drives now I have close to 150TB of storage. I usually buy 2 of the biggest drives I am willing to buy at the time, 1 becomes my new parity drive and the other becomes extra storage, with the old parity drive getting added to the pool. I recently added a 2nd parity drive as I have seem to settle on Seagate EXOS 18tb drives.
Me, since 2011 - and still using my original Lexar Firefly USB sticks (I have more than one licence). Unraid has to be one of the better decisions that I have made over the years.
@@GodmanchesterGoblinyea, especially when you look at how much features they added, it's pretty awesome.
The moments like 9:09 with UNRAD instead of UNRAID makes me want to yell through my monitor and hope that you hear me 😂
Ha! Good eye! I don't think it would have helped because the share was not exported yet? (Maybe)
@@TechnoTim I've been using Unraid for years and would be happy to answer any questions you have.
Oh good..I wasn't the only one...LOL
@@TechnoTim Sir can we use proxmox like unraid 2 gamers 1 cpu
Can we get hdmi output in proxmox
A pro tip: since the license is linked to the USB drive serial number, get a good quality USB drive or even better a known-brand SDcard reader (it will use the serial of the reader, so even if the SDcard dies you don't need to call support to ask a license transfer)
Any recommendation on reliable USB drive? My unraid server just crashed with a dead flashdrive this week and still need to replace that usb drive. 😭
Is there any way to install it on to a DOM, much more reliable?
Another option is to use a NVMe case and stick a drive in it, SD cards aren't very reliably. I have some low capacity 128gb NVMe drives from dead machine that are perfect for something like this.
FYI, I've never used unraid, just ranting about SD cards...
This is why I use Sandisk Ultrafit drives...tiny and not hanging out and risk getting damaged from "routine" maintenance and having to move the server about
@@ford9501 Spaceinvader did a test a couple of years ago and recommended the Samsung Bar Plus.
When you start using Unraid you have to throw away some preconceptions about how things work with other systems. Once you learn the tricks, it becomes more apparent.
Passing through a gpu to a VM or Docker, you have to install the driver (add the nvidia runtime plugin) and then also use the serial number of the card given by the plugin. Passing through a GPU to a VM isn't as hard as it seems either, if you have a motherboard with an onboard graphics (or cpu graphics) you can boot on that so the system itself has something, and then you pass through the (additional) GPU you installed separately itself, which is why IOMMU is so important. Up until the driver plugins were released it was a LOT harder.
I have 4 unraid servers, 1 is a 48 bay 200+TB slicestor 1440 with a 32core EPYC server board with 8tb NVMe, 256 gb ram, and a P2000 for Plex. It's a monster and runs great. Another mITX 5TB of all-nvme storage AMD 3400g "test" server, one with a 6600K and 8 bays, and another 12-bay with an AMD 3900x, 6tb nvme, with nvidia P400 card. Two of those servers run on 10Gbit, 1 on 2.5, and the others on 1gbit. Pooling NICs is done in the software, not hardware. Nvidia, Intel, and AMD have different requirements to pass through GPU acceleration for Plex/Emby, but I actually have gotten it working with all combinations: Quicksync on the 6600k, AMD's gpu acceleration (yes, it does work), and 2 boxes using Nvidia. I will say: EMBY was a pain getting acceleration going. Plex is much easier. I have learned a LOT about Linux from Unraid, and I'm a Windows admin by day. I knew just enough to be dangerous with Linux before Unraid.
Hint: Support configuration for HW accelleration depends on your video card type, and the nomenclature to access it is different. Nvidia: driver install, go to plugins, find the nvidia driver, and find the GPU-#### string, copy that and that is your "nvidia visible devices" number you need to paste in the docker (you may need to add it the Container variable NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES on Emby), and then use the --runtime=nvidia flag and restart the docker. That should fix your problem (it does with Plex). I gave up on Emby because it's still not quite user friendly to me on the encoding side. To get AMD and Intel quicksync working with Plex (and presumably Emby), you use a different flag: --device=\dev\dri, and you have to install the appropriate driver for the platform (Intel vs AMD vs Nvidia drivers), and create a device entry in the docker as well with a value that points to that "\dev\dri" even though you have it as a runtime option, you have to create the device for the runtime option to use. I think there's also another one instead of \dev\dri it's \dev
enderD128 that works (or worked in the past, I don't use Emby so I can't remember what one I used to get it to work).
I was like you at the beginning, but after I did my research and played around with it, I was able to figure these things out and started treating Unraid like more of a compartmentalized system, and so passing hardware through is one of the most difficult things at first because you have to think of the OS it boots on, the dockers, and the VMs, and drivers/plugins being all separate entities from each other, and getting them talking is the part that gets people confused. Remember that Plugins will work whether docker or VMs are running or not (that's why drivers are plugins). I'm now a few years in and still learning all sorts of things as I go.
Yes, Docker & VM snapshot/backup is done via CA plugins. CA = Community Applications, Dynamix = that refers to UNRAID themselves. Look into the following apps: Scrutiny, Unassigned Devices (THIS IS A MUST HAVE), Appdata Backup, and Netdata, and any of the CA & Dynamix plugins that may apply to you.
BTW, as someone else has mentioned, go back and look at 9:09 and realize your mistake is there to see.
i did read this whole big ass comment. checked unassigned devices app as you recommended. never thought i would be so god damn thankful for stumbling upon this
19:00 yeah I agree with that, rather than having to add extra parameters, a checkbox to enable GPU passthrough in containers would be super convienent.
UNRAID is less of a Proxmox competitor and more of a TruNAS one - they have bolted on containers and VMs [containers is more polished for sure].
I don't think Truenas is even aware there is a competition on for their commercial clients from Unraid? If anything they seem to try and funnel those with a certain mentality away from ZFS and to Unraid (I have a bunch of drives of different sizes.....). And the appliance nature of Truenas set it and Proxmox in very different camps as well (eg one can be utterly ruined if your APT sources are incorrect while the other ignores the fact that you even edited said sources). To see them as competing against one another is to miss that there is a more correct tool for most jobs being performed by a specific person. PS True Charts over on Truenas is a completely dodgy non-official thing, so no monopoly on poorly supported community apps on both systems, lol.
I just meant scope of the product. I have an UNRAID box at home, ran infrastructure on Proxmox at work and had client who used TrueNAS for their storage.
They all have their place and purpose, and do have some overlap but people should play to each ones strengths.
It's called Proxmox.
Proxmox is much easier to get GPU pass thru, or any pcie/usb peripherals to work vs trueNAS and unraid. But yeah, feels bolted on for sure, like a throwaway feature. Vms with scale feel the exact same way.
Cannot wait for all the upcoming unRaid tutorials. As a user of unRaid for a couple years now, I've not been able to find a use case that unRaid cannot fulfill. Excited to see your progress!
This is the type of content that makes the homelab community better. The good, the bad, the ugly. Been using unraid for a couple years now and love it. Also running a Proxmox server for my business for physical separation. Strengths and weaknesses in both, but great for my needs! Thank you for insights!
thank you for giving us the all in first time experience, successes plus failures and everything; it's not only me learning things the hard way. this is honestly quite helpful
Hi! I made the bbergle-jellyfin template! I made it because I could never get hardware transcoding working with any other template. I suggest trying to download that container and try again! It should work lol.
Might be a good idea to change the title to nVid Jellyfin, so it's more informative.
But thanks for doing this, if not for this comment, I would have passed it up myself.
Now I can try it out.
The biggest thing that Unraid does (and you didn't mention) is that it has the ability to add drives to the array at a later time, without having to backup/reformat/recreate the array. If you "preclear" the drive before you add it and format it, you don't even need to do a parity rebuild.
The other thing is that these drives are not being striped. Every file is intact on a given drive. It's literally JBOD with parity.
ZFS can add drives to pools now, but i don't know if it has made it into any NAS operating systems yet
That's not true. The description of how you increase your parity drive size is quite clear in, "The Parity Swap Procedure," chapter in the Unraid manual. Parity data is transferred to the new, larger disk, then the old parity is zeroed, then the data is shuffled to the old parity disk, etc... So, yes, you absolutely are recreating, formatting, as well as having always been limited by the size of your parity disk(s) with regard to how many data disks you can actually use and still have redundancy. You can't just add data disks however way or size you want at any time and it will work, not sure why every Unraid user thinks that is the case, but it does seem like a common...well, belief.
@@LackofFaithify If you work within the constraints, of which UNRAID does a decent job of advertising, it works exactly as the OP says. If you plug in a new disk, and the next step from the user is to wait some time and then use the disk... then what difference does it make what means to an end the OS used?
An other thing that new UNRAID users don't understand is that the Array is not a "true" RAID. The RAID is not done at the block level but at the files level. You have 1 or 2 parity disks. The other disks are formatted with XFS. The file system can be striped across disk so if you have a movie that movie will live only on one disk with a parity. the nice thing about this is that you can take an UNRAID disk out the server and mount it under any linux distro and the files that are on that disk are still accessible. Because files are only on a single disk this only gives you single disk read performance. Cache SSD disks are used to speed up writes. again this is a single disk SSD write performance. As long as the file is on the cache disk you will have higher performance. but once the disk is moved to DISK array you will be on the slower spinning disk performance.
I run an Ubuntu server vm in unraid. Whatever I don't want to do or can't do in unraid I simply do in the linux server vm. This pretty much handles all my homelab needs. And I used your Ubuntu server tutorial to setup that vm.
I love unraid simply for the fact you use different sized drives like a jbod but parity like a normal raid.
You had one mistake that I saw. When you were trying to connect to Movies, you typed in UNRAD, and not UNRAID. Typo is the reason you were not able to get in.
Awesome overview Tim thanks for sharing! Unraid is pretty great for beginner/non technical homelab learners like myself and others in the community.
Really like to see this. I did suggest you try unraid in one of your recent videos. Your opinion mostly matches my own. I keep a server running proxmox for VMs but I love my Unraid server for all my media & miscellaneous NAS storage. Its where all of my set and forget homelab stuff lives. Tinkering takes place somewhere else
Thanks for sharing your experience. I've been running Unraid for a long time now, and I even have it in different remote locations, to do my backup and etc. Like most of your videos, I also tried Truenas, but unraid gives me the flexibility of upgrading my drives (as long as my parity is bigger than my upgrades). With truenas my experience of having all drives the same, feels like I am stuck with the drives, unless I have to upgrade, then I upgrade all the drives to be the same. Oh well, thanks for the demo and video, have a great memorial weekend.
Welcome to the club. I've been using it for 3 years on a Chinese mini pc with Ryzen 5500U, Jellyfin transcoding works like a charm.
I'm a big fan of your work and have been following many of your videos. You're an excellent teacher, and your informative videos have been extremely helpful to me and others. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.
@@rohitbuchake7791 thank you so much! I hope to continue this!
*waits to see what happens when he gets to passing through the GPU*.
Basically you have to hit the "Advanced View" toggle in the container config, add --runtime=nvidia to the "Extra Parameters" section, add NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES key with value of the gpu identifier, and add NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES key with value "all" or "compute" (don't include quotes). After that things should pass through just fine. Then you can go to the container's console and do a nvidia-smi to confirm.
The downside to using GPU in containers is that if you try to pass through that same GPU to a VM while containers are using it the system can lock up due to fighting for resources. So each time you want to use a VM that uses that GPU you will have to remove the --runtime=nvidia parameter from each container before booting up the VM. Unless you have more than one GPU of course.
Don’t you also have to add the device (/dev/xyz) to the container in the advanced options?
@@Jake-Plus i would imagine so, it's been a while since used an Nvidia with docker, but i'm pretty sure you would have to add the device
@@Jake-Plus not needed for nvidia
Great video again! You spelt Unrad not unraid first time trying to connect to share.
Couple of months ago, I also got into unraid. I was standing between truenas scale with zfs and unraid with xfs for a successor of my virtualized storage which was hosted in a proxmox VM with openmediavault as os and snapraid as parity. I went with unraid because of the spindown of HDDs. I didn't want to discard proxmox, so I virtualized unraid in proxmox. Just create a VM without a hard disk and passthrough the stick. Works very well.
One thing to keep in mind is that unraid does not checksum files or blocks. so data corruption can still happen and it will not get noticed until you see the corruption yourself by which point it would be too late. This is not a problem with zfs which checksums blocks so when data corruption gets detected the corrupted block will get replaced by the parity
dont forget to test the power usage, unraid spin down unused drives after some time of no use. power savings for a homelab
That's isn't some special feature. Literally every os will do that, but most with a nas will disable it as drives that stay spun up last longer than drives that are constantly starting and stopping
Think highway miles vs city miles in a car
UnRaid typically saves more power than traditional RAID arrays. It allows for mixed drive sizes and selective spin-down of unused drives, reducing energy consumption.
Traditional RAID often requires all drives to be active, even when not in use, leading to higher power usage.
@@josephp1592 it is very special in unraid and one of the main reason i use it. In unraid just the disk you read from are activ, all other sleep. if you write just the one you write on and the parity disk(s) are running.
So i save a big amount of power. when all disks are running with operations or such stuff, i am using close to 200W with everything else in my homelab, when it is in idle or just one drive running, i am just a bit over 100W and this with a 130 Tb array, opnsense box, a second unraid box on a intel nuc, switch, ap, synology offline and truenas scale server offline.
My Truenas Scale server sip alone about 200W with 16x16Tb drives even when he do nothing.
There are setups with 15-20W idle with maybe 8 Drives or even more, but i can't reach this as i use 10 gbit and other things and this holding back lower c-states.
@@josephp1592 I wonder if only weekend spin ups are worse than all drives always spun up 24/7. I have a spare drive ready to go regardless but 🤔
Word on the street is that a lot of the shortcomings of the hypervisor side of things will be getting fixed in 6.12.13 which is currently in Beta testing for community developers. I don't know what all is coming but a big one I know of is snapshots. I think they're also making it so that having an array isn't a requirement to create other pools. Currently you have to have at least 1 drive in the primary array.
I've been using unraid for probably 6-8 years now and I love it and tinker with it every day. It is fun seeing someone completely new checking it out for the first time. There's a lot of stuff that was a learning curve for me too that now I take for granted so this was a fun video to watch to see how a newcomer sees it.
Super happy to see this video, I'm about to build my first server using UNRAID and love your content. Hope to see more!
I use unraid inside a proxmox vm. Passthrough the usb and HBA card and you're all set. Lff drives for unraid storage, nvmes for Vms in proxmox.
So uhh, last time I checked (a couple months ago), SSDs are not recommended for array drives because the array does NOT support TRIM. You instead want to use a Pool, where you can use ZFS. The issue is that Unraid will not work without a single device in the array. The people that do this kind of setup either put a single virtual hard disk (if Unraid is virtualized), or a USB drive or some such as a single device in the array and everything else in a pool.
edit: Please stop coming in here and replying that version 7 is different. I probably knew before you did, but this post was before that was public.
my practice has been to use 1 fast ssd for array (no parity) and use that as a caching solution for my BIG zfs pools. network transfers writes to array (NVME) -> mover passes it to zfs pool (spinning drives) as scheduled. hopefully unraid will allow using pools as cache for other pools in the future.
This is 100% correct. You really dont want to use UNRAID if you just want an SSD array
Correct, you don't want SSD's in the aray!
There are SOME SSD's that have trim built into them so that isn't a problem, finding out what SSDs that have that can be a nightmare in my experience and putting the drives in a pool is so much easier anyway and serves the same purpose.
@@davidusi27 That is not what caching means in ZFS. You have a SLOG which is for Asynchronous writes and L2ARC which is a read cache that you don't even think about until you have your system memory maxed out. There is also a metadata cache, but you spit in the eye of the Fates and gods and demons and all mankind if you only use a single SSD for that and you will get what is due to you. And for anyone that is setting up an all SSD/NVME pool for ZFS and use hba of certain gens: if your drives do not support read zero after trim, do not do it.
@@Benalbert11 Except I have 2x 2TB nvme for cache and 8 x 4TB sata SSD's for storage all zfs on Unraid. So why wouldn't I want an all SSD array?
Nice video. Unraid user since 2011 here - but I watched this because you can always learn something new. Take a look at the Disk Location plugin of you need to monitor hours used and other data in your Storinator setup.
Great take on Unraid! I really appreciate that you recognized the target user/use case for it and didn't bash on it because it didn't have all the "enterprise" features. A great follow up video would be testing out the ZFS implementation. I love the snapshot/replication ZFS adds.
Thanks for the shoutout Tim, and welcome to Unraid 🙂
I love my unraid server! It's "easy" compared to othere OS's, it's got so much expansion and it's a great learning tool
I moved from an ESXi server with multiple VMs running various services, to UNRAID running all of those services either natively (file) or docker (web, plex, cloudflare, arrs, etc). It has been set-it-and-forget-it for almost two months for me. I'm glad VMware got rid of the free ESXi version when I was ready to upgrade and I caught the old pricing for UNRAID before it ended. Oh, and I can also create any VMs I want to test for various OSes. It's really a great home solution and added storage redundancy I didn't have before.
Docker makes updating things so easy and other than slow listings for folders with 10k+ files, I've found no other faults.
Don't use Unraid as a hypervisor, the same way you wouldn't use ProxMox as a NAS.
Agreed, it's a far better Docker host than it is a hypervisor - running full VMs on it hasn't even been a thought it's so far on my "no" list. If full VMs are desired then Proxmox is the obvious choice
I use Proxmox as a NAS.
Why not?
Proxmox runs on top of Debian, so you can ABSOLUTELY make Debian a NAS OS.
(That's LITERALLY TrueNAS Scale.)
@@ewenchan1239just cuz you can doesn't mean you should when there are more readily available turnkey solutions that are designed for that. I can use a flat head screwdriver in a philips screw head but it doesn't mean I should if there's a philips screwdriver available.
People have different philosophies and use cases, but from a security standpoint, exposing unnecessary services like SMB/CIFS/NFS on your hypervisor directly isn't ideal, bind mounts via LXC container are a bit better but imo still kinda dumb, and running a TrueNAS VM with disk passthrough in Proxmox is most ideal but unless you really need to save cash to consolidate tech, best to let your Hypervisor run your apps and keep the NAS/File Server separate
It is fun to use like a KVM tho. Linus Tech Tips did two videos about x amount of users on one single computer.
i'm going to use Unraid as a hypervisor and you can't stop me
but seriously, if you're just a home user then it's good enough, but i wouldn't use it in production
i only have 3 VMs, 2 are applications that don't have docker containers, and the third is opnsense after i got tired of my router and it was the fastest solution
I have been using UNRaid for years, playing with the options but only using it as a NAS, no VM's, no containers. I just need it for Network file storage. Thanks for the video review!
It may not be the ideal product for everyone, but it’s the ideal OS for my Lab. I appreciate you taking a look at Unraid and your transparency. Honest coverage like yours is essential for the OS to develop.
I’ve been a fan of Unraid for a while now and the devs definitely respond to feedback.
Its nice to see reviews of unraid and proxmox as those are two systems currently using. I had recently moved my compute works loads off of unraid to proxmox cluster with ceph. I also ran into setting up 3rd party backups that more complicated then it needed to be. Maintenance would end up shutting down any compute workloads if those workloads didn't support HA/Clustering themselves. I continue to use Unraid for my NAS solution mainly for power savings shutting down disks.I look forward to seeing more about your proxmox adventures!
Great video about Unraid, I just started with Unraid earlier this year myself after using a Pi4 for many many years. I now have a lot more flexibility running containers and VM's without slowing my headless machine down!
Very good review. I have been using unraid for years. I have found it very useful.
Great video Tim. I'm currently running the Unraid Beta 6.13 with ZFS and Intel Arc support. It's pretty good. If you're looking at Unraid as a potential candidate, but want to utilize something you're more familiar with like ZFS, it's a beta option!
I wish you had made this video 3 years ago. I have since moved on from unraid, and yet to look back. As a NAS it is great - it worked flawlessly as a file server. I find that it is missing features I want. and hides features it has behind propriatary jargon. These days I am happily building and securing my homelab on a real linux server.
Personally I would recommend Unraid to people who only ever want a file server, but for anybody else I recommend other systems.
Unraid got me into home server stuff. I like it and it kept me motivated even after the 1 month
I've never used Unraid but from what you showed here I think it provides a really nice user experience as a NAS system, so a serious contender for TrueNAS. As you said, the "extras" (CSI containers + VMs) seems to be missing the monitoring but then again the configuration (drivers and options) are still a bit of a mixed bag, especially regarding backups. I was missing something regarding "high availability", can you even cluster two Unraid installations?
An interesting insight, as ever. Thanks Tim.
Unraid is not designes for HA and it doesnt support it. It completly different filosofy of usage due to difrent nature of organizing storage
Can backup your VMs by copying the domains directory. Also, once you bind a GPU to a VM, it is locked off from use for containers.
Few things, Unraid is great for people on a budget who upgrade or add drives as its needed as you can just take the array down and add another and it just works. and when ti comes to the USB drive Unraid loads from USB into RAM and runs from there only writing changes made to the USB as to help keep from wearing the USB drive prematurely.
I got unraid for free from a friend when I was a beginner homelabber. It was my first server OS. Seemed quite appealing having a GUI for everything as a newbie. Set up the basics (kinda like seen in the video) but always kept hitting walls that stopped me from what I wanted to do. Most guides leading me into the terminal anyways.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend unraid to anyone. Even though it’s a good starting point, the ui becomes redundant after a while when getting into more advanced tasks.
I’m not familiar with the storage structure unraid has so it is not a point of consideration in my review. This is purely from a plugin/docker/vm standpoint. Though I’d probably recommend truenas over unraid for storage as well solely based on cost.
I run UNRAID in a Proxmox VM. I love it.
2:04 your license is tied to the physical thumb drive via serial number! Backing up your config is great, but if the drive dies you have to jump through hoops to use a different thumb drive. Last I used it they only allowed a single license transfer in 12 months. So also buy a high quality drive! The metal Samsung BAR Plus is highly reviewed.
It says 12 months but Iw emailed them and got a new transfer instantly regardless.
relying on an USB drive for the life of a server is beyond no no, what on earth are they thinking..
One of us! One of us!!!
Cool....definitely going to be liking seeing your "howto's" on UnRaid like Space Invader One and the like, once you get comfortable with it and start tinkering..plus your constructive critisizm might get more "features" built into the apps that are lacking (like your mentioned "metrics" for the docker containers [there may be an app for that though])
You will be amazed at how much there is...tons of CA (community apps ;) ) to poke thru
Keep em coming!!!!
*Now that unraid has also succumbed to greed and massively increased its prices, the license is too expensive. It's interesting to note that despite the high prices, Unraid still lives from community support, all of whom work for unraid free of charge.*
Wait what, Unraid is made by volunteers?? Then who’s taking the money??
@@sidbrun_ Unraid uses 99% open-source and essentially just programs the user interface. But the *support and the testing* is done almost entirely by the community - for free, in their spare time.
ah yes, I love the shades 😎 - I have an unRAID box with all NVMEs myself but it's not a ""production"" server and its there for a few things - it's a neat OS, and the community is pretty helpful
Wow! Amazing video. I hope you post more videos regarding UnRaid.
Currently using truenas scale. Maybe ill move to unraid one day but so far pretty happy with truenas
TrueNAS is great as well. It really comes down to your use-case and what you want to accomplish. If data integrity is the most important thing, then ZFS is the clear choice. ZFS on Unraid is a thing, but I wouldn't call it fully robust yet. Unraid really prides itself by being able to add single drives, of any size, at any time. Even if you need a bigger parity drive, that's easy to do too.
Also on truenas - but think they went a bit ambitious with Kubernetes and not docker , but i guess enterprise is where theyre gonna get the $$ they think. But put a debian vm in the hypervisor of truenas and make it the docker app host instead of trying to learn the Kubernetes truecharts is a bit easier for a beginner
Я не перестаю удивляться, как просто и эффективно работает эта связка.
If you build it for dedicated plex server like myself, I can not say yes enough. The community apps with the YT vid walk throughs and the forums are very detailed and honestly easy to configure and setup. I myself am new to Unraid but got the hang of it pretty fast.
There's a lot of plugins that should be default in unraid by now. Things like appdata backup, community applications, fix common problems, nerd tools, unassigned devices, quite a few of the dynamix plugins, ca auto update.
One of the biggest benefits for me is the notifications and update of all plugins and containers. The other is that most configurations work and it notifies you if there is a conflict (such as a port). To this day I still don't know how to do port mappings and volume mappings from scratch. Nor do I want to know, so unraid is perfect.
I use and love Unraid. But I agree with everything you said. A lot needs to be improved. Luckily with the upcoming release of Unraid 7. Some of what you have pointed out are on the way, including vm snapshots.
I think the biggest benefit to Unraid in my opinion though is its stability. I've been using it for many years, with insane uptimes, and yet to experience any crash or issues that are a fault of the OS. My flash started to fail and got corrupted once. One day I get a notice saying there was a flash drive error, yet everything, all vm's, dockers, were still up and working fine for days until I could get home.
So I flashed the backup to a new flash drive, restarted it and bam, like it never happened.
Unraid is great basic NAS. I have it running as VM on proxmox. I used to have it as hardware install but as my homelab grew I switched to Proxmox. Now it just serves as NAS. The advantage is that you can easily add more disks to it later and only requirement is that the disk you add is smaller or same size as parity drive.
Hey - were you able to get GPU passthrough to containers working on PVE 8.2.2? I've been trying to do this for a while, but have had no luck... Any chance you have a guide for that?
Were you able to get the Jellyfin transcoding to work?
Also, Pro Tip: You can customize the colors beyond just setting dark mode. Settings > Display Settings, there's a few options for custom colors that accepts hex color codes. You can also set a custom header image as well.
Nice video. You’ll be back to proxmox soon 😊. Also don’t use CPU0 on your VMs CPU0 is used by Unraid. You will notice the drives are constantly read/write not stop even if nothing happens on the server..I ran unraid for 6 months on ssds and they reported 10+% wear once I moved them to proxmox. Good luck
Because you didnt understand how it works. Unraid is OS for mehanical drives (of difrens sizes if you whant). SSD/M2 drive are used as cashe drives on unraid as they are not connect to array. It completly difrent use case and you need to see first how it works and how to use it. For example it is good solution for long time storage since you can spin down unused hdds. If you use 2 drives for parity out of 10 for example and 3 hdd dies you dont loose everything, only date on does 3 drives unlike traditional zfs. Problem is speed. You are limited to speed of single hdd because they are used individualy in array.
I move from to truenas scale a week ago im happy that i change i dont know what i made with my pro licence of unraid
@@benjiro8793 hm let try to rephrase it this way. And this is my understanding of how it work, im maybe wrong. Protection (Parity) is on top of independent hard disks. So even if parity crash do to much hard drive failure, data on rest of drives are still available to use (if i recall correctly this is for xfs). in setup of 12 drives with 2 drive for parity (1 and 2) if you lose drive 5,7 and 9 for example you lost data only on them and you cannot rebuild your current setup. You need to make new setup (array) and all data on rest on hard disks should be available. In theory. Didnt try it yet, will be soon. Only tryed to simulate that 1 of 2 parity hdd died. Even if you could build new array it should be available by simply putting rest of drives on other pc and access them from any linux.
As for problem with ssd it is probably because dockers/vm that reside on array and with every write complete parity need to be recalculated. that why unraid use cache disk and is recommended to move VM/dockers to cache (maybe some docker tried to write some log, there is a way to see what is in use) . With setup like this i set most of drives to spin down with 15min of idle time to not waist power. Only cache ssd are always on.
@@RupertoCamarenagive it to me as a present 😅
@@RupertoCamarena sell the license to me
Why not use unraid as storage for proxmox VMs?
gotta love Nvidia and their commitment when it comes to linux, think you are blaming Unraid a bit unfairly when it comes to encoding and passthru, same situation on proxmox if you wanna passthru etc Nvidia is the culprit not the platforms
Unraid is at an inflection point. Some of the nice things that were missing may be showing up in the next version. CA is community apps btw. ZFS and btrfs options offer snaps for VMS as well.
For what it's worth, the Jellyfin published server URL is what it shows up as and should match what's setup in your reverse proxy in my experience. Mine is the HTTPS URL with jellyfin as a subdomain, since UA-cam will flag the comment if I put anything URL like.
I've been using Unraid for maybe 7-8 years now. I used to use a Drobo (proprietary device/os) - but it failed and had a terrible experience with that company. I wanted something similar to how DroboFS worked in that I could add drives of different sizes and add new ones without a lot of work. Main use case is for storage (have about 120 TB now - mostly 8TB drives). It also runs the R's for my media collection. My experience is that some stuff is easy, but other parts are hard to find data. I've probably watched every Space Invader One and Ibracorp video in existence! I have a second Unraid server to backup some data in my main Unraid server. Next up on my agenda is to set up a Proxmox server.
Have you tried the ZFS filesystem? With new features coming in 7 it would be better to switch to that.
There is an "Advanced View" on some of the pages such as the Docker tab that will show off the CPU/Memory usage etc. This Advanced view is also very useful when configuring the Docker container itself
I spent a year running unraid and constantly struggling with nvidia support and passthrough, 16:35 is my experience as well and I gave up and run everything on ubuntu and docker. Unraid makes a great NAS, but trying to run an application server on it in my experience was maddening.
if you love proxmox why not run unraid as a vm?
pass in your HBA and a usb controller and it's pretty easy
What kind of server do you use.. i like how the SSD's are just placed in the motherboard and vertical..
10:17 → I also really like settings. It is very frustrating when a dev/marketing team, of an app without settings, responses: "what do you need settings for and which one do you want" as if they don't know what common settings could be :)
great video, thanks Tim
I wish this video focused more on the raid / drives side of things. RAID6 - adding drives later, replacing drives. Rather than apps and settings.
I really like my 1 computer Workstation/Server setup on unRAID. I'm using GPU, SSD, and USB card passthrough. It's like having 2 computers in one, saves electricity and space of having 2 separate computers. I guess you could do this with Proxmox too, but it's so easy with unRAID.
Nice video Tim! and welcome to unraid :) it was neat to see your perspective of unraid. Oh and by the way CA= Community Applications :) maybe in the future you could get to know Ed from spaceinvaderone i think you would make a good guest on the Uncast show' Thanks for sharing the video with us!💖👍😎JP
I'm still in love with zfs. It was a love at first sight. :)
Let's get serious, though. One of the things you absolutely have to try with a new storage setup, is to take dd and start filling one of the drives with garbage. Yeah, drives are more likely to slow down and then just fail, bit still... Try it.
Last I tried btrfs would not survive this. Zfs would yawn and heal itself with no problem. Curious what unraid would do.
I love UnRaid as a NAS, but have moved all of my docker into a Ubuntu server VM (on UnRaid). Have an XFS array with one ZFS disk in the array. Then I have a separate raidz1 pool, and a ZFS cache-mirror pool. Have a script that makes snapshots of my appdata, etc, that gets sent to the ZFS disk in the array. Works fantastic. But yeah, docker feels tacked on and I prefer it in Ubuntu.
unraid is both incredibly easy to use and frustratingly obtuse to use at the same time. for a media server it's great, for a nas its ok for a vm host.... dear god help me please.
Unraid 7 is going to change the Array system dramatically - the array will be just another pool, it'll support multiple arrays or even zero arrays. VM system also expanding to include snapshots, cloning and other features. 7 is the next release and it's in beta right now. Release supposed to be "coming soon"
17:39 You don't actually connect it to a monitor you use an HDMI dummy plug (headless dongle)
This is what I came here to say
Mine server is basically a nas with a hand full of things bolted on (emby, r-stack, nextcloud, minecraft server, photoprism) so unraid works pretty well for all that. The apps part makes setting things up pretty easy as-well, which I liked more as home lab noob.
Great video. Been using unraid for almost a decade now. Interface is not very intuitive indeed and I totally agree with your obvious things it's missing. They seem to have a very little dev team and they are moving slow on updates and features. They did finally add open zfs recently but only parts of it for now. I'm still looking at replacing it with proxmox by visualizing unraid at first to allow me time to learn how to deploy containers on another vm under proxmox
What card is this? :O 0:38
Clicking the ❓ in the task bar adds an expanded context mention explaining various options throughout the UI.
I wouldn't use Unraid for the hypervisor, I'd use it for specifically storage. this is what I think it's most useful for.
I'm pretty skeptical of it as a secure solution for the hypervisor. I'd much rather keep it either in a VM hosted on Proxmox ( dedicated Nas for it ) or on a dedicated Nas itself, but not use it as a host.
Is it possible to use an virtualized usb in proxmox to run Unraid?
Best tip. Got all the info on paper, like UID a nd other info related to the USB, as it had a tendency to die a lot
The best feature of unraid I think is how easy you can change hardware. It really only care about the usb pen and your hdd/ssd’s🤩
I use what i got, and sometimes better equipment pops up. Then I just move to the better hardware and push the power button and I am up and running again😎👌🏻
Watching via a vm with gpu passthrough on unraid. Flawless once hyperv features are turned on.
I suspect I will draw some flack but as you seem to have a 6x 1TB ssd's then no point in cache or parity as that's for when you have a HDD array. Instead I would create a zfs raidz (1 drive fail) or raidz2 (2 drive fail) pool with those 6x 1TB ssd's = 4-5TB pool, also zfs supports ssd trim.
What desk is that in the back ground ?
9:09 it is like when you add it to the `/etc/exports` you can check the boot file for the export statememt
12:15 Community Application (CA)
I moved from unraid to proxmox, and I dont miss unraid. I used ibramenu to make my containers templates. The only reason (actually the second reason, the first one is that I also paid for it), that I still have unraid running is because it is a pain to trasnfer the 60+ TB of media I have in unraod array. But it I think it os better than running 20 HDD at once every time I run a moview from a zfs file system. Unraid will only spin up that individual drive.
Make sure you check out the new version 7...added ZFS and HUGE improvements to the VM side of things. (EDIT: V7 adds VM stats and snapshots.)
nvidia keylace patch removes restriction on maximum number of simultaneous NVENC video encoding sessions imposed by Nvidia to consumer-grade GPUs. Its good to be unlocked in unraid when using hardware encoding!
Way to wait till they move to subscription model! Nice video!
They still have a lifetime license option... Unfortunately, it's the most expensive(and imo, ridiculously priced) license($249USD)
-Edit-
Clarification: all the licenses are lifetime, they just stop receiving updates after 1yr unless you pay a $36/yr subscription, you can still used it after that year w/o a sub, but they won't provide you any new updates; the $249 lifetime license gets updates as long as Unraid produces updates, without a sub
Under the container creation page, there was a basic mode switch on the top right. Maybe if they moved that to somewhere like the bottom next to the finish button
Your review is well-done but I think you need to dive deeper into unraid. I'm curious whether or not the docker containers are running in the host space or is wrapped in a ghost VM. The problem with Docker and some other container technology is that they use overlay file systems such that if the container makes changes to the filesystem as in logs... that will cause an increase in the number of files and file-space taken. If it's on the host then the entire system could fail and in dramatic fashion.
Can you make a comparison between Unraid and OMV? A paid vs free option for beginner homelabbers.
great idea