I tried Unraid for the FIRST time in 2024

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  • čas pƙidĂĄn 15. 06. 2024
  • I knew nothing about Unraid until today. I finally installed Unraid in my HomeLab on one of my servers. Is it any good? Does it live up to the hype? Let's find out in my candid walkthrough of Unraid as you see and hear my successes as well as my struggles.
    - This video is NOT sponsored.
    - I bought Unraid with my own money.
    - If you'd like see more sponsor-free videos, see one of the ways to support me below!
    Video Notes: technotim.live/posts/unraid-f...
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    00:00 - Why Unraid?
    00:55 - SPONSORED by YOU
    01:18 - What is Unraid
    01:46 - Installing Unraid
    03:01 - First impressions, first boot
    03:51 - My Goals
    04:29 - Dark Mode
    04:50 - Dashboard
    05:58 - Build Array
    07:31 - Cache Drives
    08:03 - Network Shares
    10:05 - Settings
    11:32 - Adhoc Docker Containers
    11:56 - App Store
    12:40 - Installing Apps
    14:21 - Getting Transcoding Working (or not)
    16:55 - Creating a Virtual Machine
    18:18 - Is Unraid Worth it??
    Thank you for watching!
  • Věda a technologie

Komentáƙe • 406

  • @camdibs
    @camdibs Pƙed 23 dny +297

    The moments like 9:09 with UNRAD instead of UNRAID makes me want to yell through my monitor and hope that you hear me 😂

    • @TechnoTim
      @TechnoTim  Pƙed 23 dny +29

      Ha! Good eye! I don't think it would have helped because the share was not exported yet? (Maybe)

    • @arubial1229
      @arubial1229 Pƙed 23 dny +2

      ​@@TechnoTim I've been using Unraid for years and would be happy to answer any questions you have.

    • @haydenc2742
      @haydenc2742 Pƙed 23 dny +7

      Oh good..I wasn't the only one...LOL

    • @yashgaur1094
      @yashgaur1094 Pƙed 23 dny +1

      ​@@TechnoTim Sir can we use proxmox like unraid 2 gamers 1 cpu

    • @yashgaur1094
      @yashgaur1094 Pƙed 23 dny

      Can we get hdmi output in proxmox

  • @marcogenovesi8570
    @marcogenovesi8570 Pƙed 23 dny +163

    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)

    • @ford9501
      @ford9501 Pƙed 23 dny +6

      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. 😭

    • @Glenbow1970
      @Glenbow1970 Pƙed 23 dny +1

      Is there any way to install it on to a DOM, much more reliable?

    • @affieuk
      @affieuk Pƙed 23 dny +16

      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...

    • @haydenc2742
      @haydenc2742 Pƙed 23 dny +8

      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

    • @Drkayb
      @Drkayb Pƙed 23 dny

      @@ford9501 Spaceinvader did a test a couple of years ago and recommended the Samsung Bar Plus.

  • @AidenPryde3025
    @AidenPryde3025 Pƙed 23 dny +68

    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.

    • @davidusi27
      @davidusi27 Pƙed 23 dny +7

      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.

    • @Benalbert11
      @Benalbert11 Pƙed 23 dny +8

      This is 100% correct. You really dont want to use UNRAID if you just want an SSD array

    • @Yock1980
      @Yock1980 Pƙed 23 dny +1

      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.

    • @LackofFaithify
      @LackofFaithify Pƙed 22 dny +1

      @@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.

    • @fwiler
      @fwiler Pƙed 22 dny

      @@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?

  • @mikegmcg
    @mikegmcg Pƙed 23 dny +63

    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].

    • @LackofFaithify
      @LackofFaithify Pƙed 22 dny

      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.

    • @mikegmcg
      @mikegmcg Pƙed 22 dny +1

      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.

    • @heyyoo
      @heyyoo Pƙed 22 dny

      It's called Proxmox.

  • @andrewetherton3107
    @andrewetherton3107 Pƙed 18 dny +4

    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!

  • @Benalbert11
    @Benalbert11 Pƙed 23 dny +37

    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.

  • @DavidEsotica
    @DavidEsotica Pƙed 23 dny +13

    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.

  • @lukebates4631
    @lukebates4631 Pƙed 23 dny +2

    Super happy to see this video, I'm about to build my first server using UNRAID and love your content. Hope to see more!

  • @bentubeblu
    @bentubeblu Pƙed 23 dny +6

    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!

  • @hnguk
    @hnguk Pƙed 23 dny +10

    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.

    • @Ziogref
      @Ziogref Pƙed 20 dny +3

      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.

  • @robertboskind
    @robertboskind Pƙed 23 dny +5

    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

  • @Tgspartnership
    @Tgspartnership Pƙed 23 dny

    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

  • @haydenc2742
    @haydenc2742 Pƙed 23 dny +3

    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!!!!

  • @chrisumali9841
    @chrisumali9841 Pƙed 22 dny

    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.

  • @blahblahblah1787
    @blahblahblah1787 Pƙed 23 dny +33

    *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.

    • @Jake-Plus
      @Jake-Plus Pƙed 22 dny

      Don’t you also have to add the device (/dev/xyz) to the container in the advanced options?

    • @Tracenji
      @Tracenji Pƙed 22 dny

      @@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

    • @tjb_altf4
      @tjb_altf4 Pƙed 21 dnem

      ​@@Jake-Plus not needed for nvidia

  • @jason-budney7624
    @jason-budney7624 Pƙed 22 dny +1

    Nice video Tim! I bought a license a while back to eventually try UNRAID. I just haven't had the time to do so. My go to is Proxmox with a virtualized TrueNAS Scale VM.

  • @saiyantwan
    @saiyantwan Pƙed 23 dny +11

    I love unraid simply for the fact you use different sized drives like a jbod but parity like a normal raid.

  • @JByteTX
    @JByteTX Pƙed 21 dnem

    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.

  • @DonKiiskila
    @DonKiiskila Pƙed 23 dny +6

    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.

  • @NielsenPhotos
    @NielsenPhotos Pƙed 19 dny

    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!

  • @blitzio
    @blitzio Pƙed 22 dny +1

    Awesome overview Tim thanks for sharing! Unraid is pretty great for beginner/non technical homelab learners like myself and others in the community.

  • @happytodd
    @happytodd Pƙed 23 dny

    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!

  • @OptimisedTutorials
    @OptimisedTutorials Pƙed 22 dny +1

    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!

  • @ScottMackey
    @ScottMackey Pƙed 23 dny +14

    Great video again! You spelt Unrad not unraid first time trying to connect to share.

  • @joelfrojmowicz
    @joelfrojmowicz Pƙed 23 dny

    Wow! Amazing video. I hope you post more videos regarding UnRaid.

  • @JamieStuff
    @JamieStuff Pƙed 22 dny +32

    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.

    • @Tracenji
      @Tracenji Pƙed 22 dny +2

      ZFS can add drives to pools now, but i don't know if it has made it into any NAS operating systems yet

    • @LackofFaithify
      @LackofFaithify Pƙed 21 dnem

      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.

    • @jong2359
      @jong2359 Pƙed 15 dny

      @@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?

  • @jafizzle95
    @jafizzle95 Pƙed 22 dny +1

    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.

  • @joecool169
    @joecool169 Pƙed 22 dny +2

    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.

  • @TechySpeaking
    @TechySpeaking Pƙed 23 dny +45

    Don't use Unraid as a hypervisor, the same way you wouldn't use ProxMox as a NAS.

    • @alienJIZ1990
      @alienJIZ1990 Pƙed 22 dny +3

      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

    • @ewenchan1239
      @ewenchan1239 Pƙed 22 dny +6

      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.)

    • @alienJIZ1990
      @alienJIZ1990 Pƙed 22 dny

      @@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

    • @mrcuddles90
      @mrcuddles90 Pƙed 22 dny +1

      It is fun to use like a KVM tho. Linus Tech Tips did two videos about x amount of users on one single computer.

    • @Tracenji
      @Tracenji Pƙed 22 dny +1

      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

  • @xiradio
    @xiradio Pƙed 23 dny

    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.

  • @johnvanwinkle4351
    @johnvanwinkle4351 Pƙed 17 dny

    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!

  • @ArronLorenz
    @ArronLorenz Pƙed 23 dny

    lol. It's great that you are diving into this. Your videos on docker got me off of Unraid really quickly.

    • @shootinputin6332
      @shootinputin6332 Pƙed 23 dny

      I just moved them into a Ubuntu VM on UnRaid.. lol.

  • @IEnjoyCreatingVideos
    @IEnjoyCreatingVideos Pƙed 23 dny +1

    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

  • @HansPans3000
    @HansPans3000 Pƙed 23 dny +1

    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.

  • @frostiee22
    @frostiee22 Pƙed 23 dny +12

    dont forget to test the power usage, unraid spin down unused drives after some time of no use. power savings for a homelab

    • @josephp1592
      @josephp1592 Pƙed 18 dny

      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

    • @frostiee22
      @frostiee22 Pƙed 18 dny

      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.

    • @thescandalchannel
      @thescandalchannel Pƙed 14 hodinami

      @@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.

  • @cjhammel
    @cjhammel Pƙed 23 dny +13

    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.

  • @Bill_the_Red_Lichtie
    @Bill_the_Red_Lichtie Pƙed 23 dny +2

    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.

    • @IceSerbia
      @IceSerbia Pƙed 23 dny +1

      Unraid is not designes for HA and it doesnt support it. It completly different filosofy of usage due to difrent nature of organizing storage

  • @finbenton
    @finbenton Pƙed 22 dny +3

    The best part about UNRAID is that you will never lose all your files, if a drive fails, you have parity and if your drive and parity fails, you still only lose the files on that 1 drive and nothing else. If your hardware fails, you can still take out the drives and use them on another linux machine to access the files.

    • @LackofFaithify
      @LackofFaithify Pƙed 21 dnem

      So you think that corporations and governments use ZFS or any other filesystem/distributed set up to store exabytes of data even though they will risk losing all their data from a single drive failure? From multiple failures? How does Unraid deal with file integrity mismatch between parity and data: that is, one is bad, one is not, which is which? As Unraid is Linux, I would hope you could read disks from...linux.

  • @StarFox1988
    @StarFox1988 Pƙed 23 dny

    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

  • @maxdiamond55
    @maxdiamond55 Pƙed 22 dny

    great video, thanks Tim

  • @darthkielbasa
    @darthkielbasa Pƙed 23 dny

    Clicking the ❓ in the task bar adds an expanded context mention explaining various options throughout the UI.

  • @parapotes
    @parapotes Pƙed 21 dnem

    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

  • @philippemiller4740
    @philippemiller4740 Pƙed 23 dny

    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

  • @cmdrleto
    @cmdrleto Pƙed 22 dny

    Watching via a vm with gpu passthrough on unraid. Flawless once hyperv features are turned on.

  • @ks0z3
    @ks0z3 Pƙed 23 dny +2

    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.

  • @RiggerBrew
    @RiggerBrew Pƙed 23 dny

    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.

  • @Fiftykilowatt
    @Fiftykilowatt Pƙed 21 dnem

    Unraid got me into home server stuff. I like it and it kept me motivated even after the 1 month

  • @bawitdaba1337
    @bawitdaba1337 Pƙed 22 dny

    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

  • @DovahDoVolom
    @DovahDoVolom Pƙed 23 dny

    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.

  • @MahdiYusuf
    @MahdiYusuf Pƙed 23 dny

    Way to wait till they move to subscription model! Nice video!

    • @jeffreyeaton5214
      @jeffreyeaton5214 Pƙed 22 dny

      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

  • @ystebadvonschlegel3295
    @ystebadvonschlegel3295 Pƙed 22 dny

    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.

  • @recoveryguru
    @recoveryguru Pƙed 23 dny

    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.

  • @ex1tium
    @ex1tium Pƙed 23 dny

    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.

  • @johnworoniuk477
    @johnworoniuk477 Pƙed 23 dny +4

    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

    • @IceSerbia
      @IceSerbia Pƙed 23 dny +2

      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.

    • @RupertoCamarena
      @RupertoCamarena Pƙed 23 dny +1

      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
      @benjiro8793 Pƙed 23 dny

      @@IceSerbia Heuuu, you want to update that statement. If 3 drives die, with a 2 parity setup, you lost the data on those 3 drives. Unraid can not recover from that. You need one parity drive PER drive that goes offline. Now Unraid has a advantage that each drive is its own File System, so you can still have 5~7 drives worth of data (depends if a failed drive was parity drive or not ). But from the 8/10, you lose at minimum 1, if 3 drives go boom at the same time.
      Also, you failed to understand Johns issue. He was saying that there has been system writes, non stop, even with no activity. What sounds more to me, that a VM or Docker container was doing non-stop writes and has nothing to do with the cache/hdd layering.

    • @IceSerbia
      @IceSerbia Pƙed 23 dny

      @@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.

    • @yorkan213swd6
      @yorkan213swd6 Pƙed 22 dny

      @@RupertoCamarenagive it to me as a present 😅

  • @thefoxhouse
    @thefoxhouse Pƙed 22 dny

    I think you’ll find Gray is actually more in line with Dark Mode. Great video, although I’m sorry you discovered Unraid after the price increase. Also, I’m pretty sure you want to make your Shares private, not public

  • @MegaBlindy
    @MegaBlindy Pƙed 18 dny

    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

  • @ManjaroBlack
    @ManjaroBlack Pƙed 23 dny +2

    I run UNRAID in a Proxmox VM. I love it.

  • @Mandolorian84
    @Mandolorian84 Pƙed 23 dny

    beautiful! I always wanted to see what URAID can do.

  • @gloeckle
    @gloeckle Pƙed 21 dnem

    Pretty good first impressions video. I can understand that you can not cover everything in such a video - but (yah sorry...) how the array works? why is it called unraid? what the ups and downs are of an "unraid" array, how does it get "installed" and why it doesn't, what's on that tools page and maybe how does the docu look like? is it useable? These topics could've added maybe 5 mins but are very crucial for someone making a decision. IMHO. cheers.

  • @AZTrucker
    @AZTrucker Pƙed 21 dnem

    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.

  • @Wyatt_B
    @Wyatt_B Pƙed 23 dny

    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.

  • @thomaskrakenes333
    @thomaskrakenes333 Pƙed 23 dny

    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’sđŸ€©
    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 againđŸ˜ŽđŸ‘ŒđŸ»

  • @evkonoff
    @evkonoff Pƙed 23 dny +3

    You had a typo when tried to connect to the share before exporting

  • @techrja
    @techrja Pƙed 22 dny

    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

  • @ChrisRider
    @ChrisRider Pƙed 22 dny

    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.

  • @zuighemdanmaar752
    @zuighemdanmaar752 Pƙed 22 dny

    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

  • @xoxide1017
    @xoxide1017 Pƙed 21 dnem

    What kind of server do you use.. i like how the SSD's are just placed in the motherboard and vertical..

  • @-martintheengineer-7465
    @-martintheengineer-7465 Pƙed 23 dny

    Nice shirt! Best regards from germany - Martin

  • @shootinputin6332
    @shootinputin6332 Pƙed 23 dny

    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.

  • @Locationary
    @Locationary Pƙed 23 dny +3

    Currently using truenas scale. Maybe ill move to unraid one day but so far pretty happy with truenas

    • @arubial1229
      @arubial1229 Pƙed 23 dny +6

      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.

    • @brucemcleod5575
      @brucemcleod5575 Pƙed 22 dny

      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

    • @JilaSapu
      @JilaSapu Pƙed 22 dny

      ĐŻ ĐœĐ” пДрДстаю уЎОĐČĐ»ŃŃ‚ŃŒŃŃ, ĐșĐ°Đș ĐżŃ€ĐŸŃŃ‚ĐŸ Đž ŃŃ„Ń„Đ”ĐșтоĐČĐœĐŸ Ń€Đ°Đ±ĐŸŃ‚Đ°Đ”Ń‚ эта сĐČŃĐ·ĐșĐ°.

  • @jaho543
    @jaho543 Pƙed 22 dny

    Can you do CPU pinning on proxmox? I was surprised unraid has that option, which is really cool. Would be even cooler if you could map E and P cores individually for Intel processors.

  • @jafizzle95
    @jafizzle95 Pƙed 22 dny

    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.

  • @techpchouse
    @techpchouse Pƙed 21 dnem

    @15:00 CA is community application, probably the apps you are downloading :) before the latest big Unraid update, the CA had to be added separately. maybe due to some rights/copyrights issues

  • @jsclayton
    @jsclayton Pƙed 23 dny +7

    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.

    • @finbenton
      @finbenton Pƙed 22 dny

      It says 12 months but Iw emailed them and got a new transfer instantly regardless.

    • @LiviuPavel
      @LiviuPavel Pƙed 22 dny

      relying on an USB drive for the life of a server is beyond no no, what on earth are they thinking..

  • @fwiler
    @fwiler Pƙed 22 dny

    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.

  • @Sismodium
    @Sismodium Pƙed 23 dny +1

    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.

  • @RupertoCamarena
    @RupertoCamarena Pƙed 23 dny

    Will you make more truenas scale videos? With the new truenas jailmaker!!đŸ„°đŸ„°

  • @Nimble_Bitz
    @Nimble_Bitz Pƙed 22 dny

    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.

  • @jegwebb
    @jegwebb Pƙed 23 dny

    Totally feel the need for the 😎without dark mode!!

  • @magma3046
    @magma3046 Pƙed 22 dny

    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.

  • @urmastertech
    @urmastertech Pƙed 21 dnem

    What I thought you always had unraid haha. I had freenas previously but won't go back. I may install proxmox on a older pc to try that out though.

  • @Xiefux
    @Xiefux Pƙed 22 dny

    im using unraid and like it, but if i were to look for a OS right now i'd steer clear of it because if the pricing. you pay 100+ euros just to get updates for a year and thats it, i was lucky to be grandfathered in to the pro version.
    another thing it has over truenas for example is that it can reliably spin down hard drives, i need it since the server is too loud during the night.
    tried doing the same thing on truenas but it would just randomly spin the back up, doesnt matter if you used the server or not

  • @tygi
    @tygi Pƙed 22 dny

    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 :)

  • @Bear-form
    @Bear-form Pƙed 16 dny

    The sunglasses cracked me up.

  • @espressomatic
    @espressomatic Pƙed 6 dny

    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"

  • @darthkielbasa
    @darthkielbasa Pƙed 23 dny +8

    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.

  • @cam_934
    @cam_934 Pƙed 7 dny

    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.

  • @seethruhead7119
    @seethruhead7119 Pƙed 23 dny +4

    if you love proxmox why not run unraid as a vm?
    pass in your HBA and a usb controller and it's pretty easy

  • @praetorxyn
    @praetorxyn Pƙed 23 dny

    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 CZcams will flag the comment if I put anything URL like.

  • @-Good4Y0u
    @-Good4Y0u Pƙed 23 dny

    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.

  • @user-rk3uu5ge5y
    @user-rk3uu5ge5y Pƙed 23 dny

    I just caught the same thing, Yo Tim, Typo!!!

  • @DeNNiiiable
    @DeNNiiiable Pƙed 22 dny

    I have a few licence Lifetime versions. I use it as NAS and for Docker. Regards to NVIDIA some containers are more popular because the have howto's. I also did not see you assign the gpuid against the Docker container so it knows what card you are giving it

  • @yeahimnotcool
    @yeahimnotcool Pƙed 23 dny

    I know that plex + quicksync requires passing /dev/dri into the container. I’m guessing that’s true for NVIDIA, too.

  • @adammontgomery7980
    @adammontgomery7980 Pƙed 23 dny +1

    Why not use unraid as storage for proxmox VMs?

  • @the_13east
    @the_13east Pƙed 23 dny

    the word network attached storage whispering in the middle will help new users ! do that more often ... thanks

  • @user-cm3wd5hk1p
    @user-cm3wd5hk1p Pƙed 23 dny

    I have two Unraid licenses but it doesn’t always work right.
    I can’t seem to get transcoding working on either Jellyfin or Plex with the right extra parameters and everything when I had it working before. So I’m going to try doing a VM for it to see if that fixes it.
    I really like how easy some things are with UnRaid but hate some other things like this.

    • @haydenc2742
      @haydenc2742 Pƙed 23 dny +1

      Get a dummy HDMI plug...

    • @user-cm3wd5hk1p
      @user-cm3wd5hk1p Pƙed 23 dny

      @@haydenc2742 stupid me. I had that on the other build but never moved it over!

  • @Stefan-vn8ve
    @Stefan-vn8ve Pƙed 23 dny

    Great to see!

  • @nonoagain6547
    @nonoagain6547 Pƙed 23 dny +3

    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.

  • @drewa4235
    @drewa4235 Pƙed 22 dny

    I have been using unraid for a while for trying virtual gaming. I like it but I’ve never been able to get full performance out of my gpu because of some strange gpu bottleneck I can’t figure out. Tried for ages to fix it but no dice. Other than that it’s fine for what it is.

    • @jacobnix6691
      @jacobnix6691 Pƙed 21 dnem

      What I have found is to CPU pin to the VM and isolate those cores.

  • @yashgaur1094
    @yashgaur1094 Pƙed 23 dny

    Sir can we use proxmox like unraid as 2 gamers 1 cpu