The Pros and Cons of UnRAID - Should You Use It?

How to Install UnRAID on an Asustor NAS How to Install UnRAID on an Asustor NAS

Video Chapters
00:00 - The Start
18:22 - The Purpose of this Video
01:01 - Resource Consumption
03:18 - Now with ZFS Support
04:20 - Hardware Entry Point
05:48 - Unique Parity Mechanic
07:16 - Great App/Container Interface
09:15 - Transfer Speeds are a bit pants
10:43 - The learning curve...
12:06 - Lack of ARM Support
14:00 - Single Admin/Root User
15:11 - Not Free

[Jordan-hzwr]

As someone who works with TrueNAS and ZFS daily, I like Unraid because I don’t have to think too hard to use it. Some might say this sucks the fun out of life, but when I just want some network storage dammit, it’s a welcome change of pace.

[testdasi]

Important notes and tips:
1. Unraid REQUIRES a USB stick (i.e. you can't boot off SSD, not even an eMMC chip), which is both a pro and a con. If your stick drops offline (which is not uncommon with USB 3.0 devices), your server will crash. If your stick overheats and dies (which is not uncommon with USB 3.0 devices), your server will crash. Oh and the stick is your license. So make sure to get a good branded stick and a USB3.0-to-USB2.0 adapter / cable. It will boot a bit slower (about 10s) but it will be a lot more stable.
1b. I'm actually quite disillusioned with Unraid folks for their continuous and outright refusal to allow booting from SSD. I have no problem with keeping the USB stick as my license key but having a production server booting off USB stick is just unconscionable in 2020s.

2. ZFS and gaming VM don't mix. ZFS uses whatever cores it wants and under heavy IO, even with core isolation, your gaming VM will lag. This has been an issue for many years but isn't fixed because I guess it's a relatively small overlap so low demand for fix.

3. Unraid parity mechanic only applies to the "array" - there is only 1 array of max 30 devices. You can do normal RAID stuff with unlimited number of "pools" (formerly cache pool, formerly just cache). So as a NAS, it's a best of both world e.g. less important media library in the array, more important data in ZFS z1 pool, appdata on a raid-1 btrfs pool, temp download in a single-device xfs pool, etc.

Source: using Unraid since 2015.

[Cypher_NZ]

Unraid does not run off a usb stick, it boots from one. Once the OS is loaded it runs from RAM.

[gswhite]

Unraid should you use it. Absolutely yes.

In fact I dumped Synology for Unraid and never looked back

[jacobp]

Write performance is around 75 Mb/s and read is the speed of a single hard drive e.g. 200-250 Mb/s. Add cashe and its possibly to saturate a 10GBe connection. I have 2TB nvme ssd as cashe and 10GBe. Data will be moved from cashe to the drives by schedule.

IMO one of the best things with unraid is that not all drives will be spinning all the time. Only the one drive that holds the data in use will spin up. This saves a lot of electricity.

[kobayashimaru]

Unraid is fantastic, especially for a home server you're cobbling together with random parts. My first server I started with lower capacity hard drives (few 6TB hdd). When I needed more space, I bought a larger hdd and replaced the parity disk with it. I then moved the old parity drive into the array. I've been doing that until I got to 14TB parity drive. From here I'm just adding drives directly to the array.
I'm now building a second system out of spare parts and looked at some alternatives such as TrueNAS. However I keep coming back to Unraid due to it's flexibility and ease of use. Yea you gotta pay but it's not much for a basic license and you can upgrade as you go.

[Richardj]

Transfer of files is to the cache (SSD) then to the hard drives at a later times. When reading from the hard drives it maxes my 1g network. Haven't tested higher speed networks. Lower power usage is a plus, hard drive only run when they are needed.

[asktheprophet]

I rarely comment on Youtube, but I just have to say, Nice Job. I'll 100% be watching your other vids. This seems like exactly what I need. Not worried about speed. Just want a place to sync my QNAP to and have a bunch of random HHDs and SSDs. The PC ITX box is half decent 5 years ago so it should be good for VMs I also want to run. Thanks Mate!

[m]

I tried unraid I really like it, its simple to use and runs fast, I run my own media server, well I tried truenas scale thats great but I cant gte sonarr to import my tv shows when downloaded on unraid it works just fine and did not take long to setup, I wish there would be an option to install to a hard drive, the only thing which really is stopping me from pulling the trigger is this 1 year of updates if I am going to spend $50 on 1 year I would expect to get security updates after the one year, paying $250 is not an option its way too much for what it is.

[GameOverAus]

Another option. For Windows based users is Drivepool its cheaper and does the drive pooling which can be expanded at will and you have options for duplicating data on a schedule. it doesn't have parity but it writes files to one disk at a time swapping drives each time spreading them across the drives in that fashion like Unraid. If you remove a drive all the files on that disk are copied to the other drives during the removal procces and are still there and readable by anything that can access Fat32/NTFS. Drivepool also has caching aswell.

Now Unraid obviously has many additional functions and is more efficient and better performance but if all you want is a file server.

Personally i like the idea of Unraid and used it in the past on older systems but for some reason my hardware is locked so i can't test it out on either of my systems and tho it detects my onboard 1Gb standard intel network it wont connect to the internet at all. Also i'd be in the Tier 2 price which i can't justify.

TrueNas Core is great in theory but in my case it's hit and miss with my Marvell based 10Gbe network cards and the pools keep dissapearing and or permissions keep denying access.to my windows main pc.

[dnwheeler]

For me, the most important feature of UnRaid is that every drive is completely self-contained. In the case of a major failure, you can remove individual drives and plug them into another computer and retrieve all the files stored on those drives. In most RAID systems, the data on individual drives is not usable without all the other drives.

It is also very easy to set up dual-parity with UnRaid, which allows for the failure of any two drives simultaneously. This is very comforting when you have a drive failure and have to replace and rebuild a drive - with only single parity, if another drive fails during the rebuild process, you will lose data. Dual-parity keeps you protected while replacing a failed drive. Again, if MORE than two drives fail at once, all of the data on the functioning drives is still retrievable.

I have lost two other RAID arrays in the past due to hardware failures and lost everything. I don't want to go through that ever again.

[andresvaldevit]

As of now the pricing has completely changed. The pricing plays around with OS security updates which are included for just one year with the starter and unleashed licenses. The Lifetime, with everything unlimited, OS updates too goes for 249$.
249$ is the price of a used 2 bay Synology, or a new J series 2 bay Synology, which includes all software

[DeNNiiiable]

Nice try but your list is a little flaky but do keep up the good work :) but here is some in sight from someone use uses it daily for a few years now:
1. performance: i use a 2TB SSD Cache and can hammer it for a long time on 10gb and then eventually it starts slowing down when cache is full and auto clears every hour if you set it / 2. user friendly:: its more user friendly then truenas like for example setting up shares, users and sharing data with them/ 3. Raid: you cant truly EVER lose all your data as even if you have 1 parity and lose 3/20 drives you will only lose the data of those 3 drives as the files are kept in full on each drive so you can just mount the failed drives to the same server or another one and migrate the data out as long as they are not 100% dead but even then recovery is VERY likely possible as data is not striped. / 4. DISKS Sizes: Mix and match freely as long as the biggest disk is the parity / 5. Independent: You can transfer all the parts to a complety different machine, different cpu, different sata or raid cards, you can swap raid cards as you see fit as long as they in IT mode and it does not care what so ever pr from raid card to direct sata / 6. Flexibility: you want to add disks, stop raid ad disk start raid. you wand to shrink the raid by removing disk or disks? move data out of disk or disks, stop raid start new config from menu, un-select the disk you dont want and start raid and done . you want to replace disk with bigger then drop raid and select disk to replace it and start raid and done. / 7. VM (passthrough): I assume you never watched the earlier LTT Videos like 7 gamers 1 pcu or something like that but you can pass hardware even usb, sound or anything else directly to a VM and so you could put in 2-3+ graphic cards and technically have 2-3+ people use 1 pc but run 2-3 separate environments with they screen keyboard and mouse, heaphones as if they were truly separate computers as long as you have enough PC/RAM to go around. 8. USB/OS Rebuild: very eazy as you back up data to cloud or other places and then you just copy the data and overwrite a newly made unraid usb stick /9. Docker: i use syncthing to back up the appdata folder to another device so rebuild is decently simple // I my self have been using Synology for over 10 years. i have 2 8 bay synolology's, I also have few 4-12bay rack qnap servers but all of those have slowly become secondary to my Unraid Servers which are 4-20BAY with mixed disks 12-16TB and the branded NAS all except a single 8 bay Synology have been shelved in the last few years and come out once in a while when I want to try something

[ianjacepreville]

Yes they do give you 30-day trial but you can also extend that for another 15 days I've done it at least that was 4 years ago

[RollerCoasterLineProductions]

You are right, initial setup of the disks and figuring out what the heck is going on with the preclear/parity check is annoying to a first time user. I stumbled thru the setup on old hardware, then built a fast new multithreaded server with the 3) 8tb ironwolf and a 1tb wd as a cache drive

[THEGEG]

1 - massive benefit to unraid is you can pass through nearly any disk format within a few clicks of the ui. This is a massive benefit if you have disks with data on it already. I think the best setup is to have a small node with unraid for apps/ external drives then a proper nas as data storage.

[jakethesnake]

the way unraid stores its data and accesses them one at a time (vs traditional raid) was one of my main reasons for going with it. I liked that you could still have dual parity but if something crazy happens and a third drive dies before you can replace the first two then you only lose the data on that one drive. For a media server its pretty perfect at least for my use case. I have 4 or 5 streams max going at once and never have any issues. It saturates my 1gb network regardless even when writing directly to the array over the network since i dont write to cache drives.

[AlexandreRacine]

Great to see that your audio sync is getting better. Keep up the good work!

[jmoss]

i am sold, thank you truly. exactly wat i needed to know. cheers mate

[fandibus]

If using ZFS can you still mix and match drives without losing space? Or does it have to be BTRFS? This is one of the most important features to me when choosing NAS software.