Unraid lessons learnt?

DHR

DHR

DHR

Soldato
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30 Apr 2003
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I'm toying with getting an old PC configured running unraid, but hadn't realised it's a paid product, as cheap as it is.

I dabbled with truenas a while back but then didn't do anything with it, now have a few small servers I need to run so it's time to revisit and I see unraid coming up a lot.

For those that run it for storage and vms do you have any lessons learnt the hard way you can share?
 
As someone who is currently setting up their first unraid server...
You get a 30 day + a short extension if you ask them to try it out.

The online documentation (and in the gui) sucks imo and I just can't listen to that spaceinvader guy on youtube for long, even if he is incredibly knowledgable.
The user interface is nowhere near as user friendly as something like synology and some of the thing really could be done slightly different imo.
Ensure you do a memtest before you do anything as dodgy ram (or what I thought was...see below) is a pain in the rear when doing parity drives.
Make sure your bios is updated and most of my sensors on my msi b760m board aren't picked up....my ram wasn't fully supported by the bios (new system with 2x48GB sticks, yes I know overkill) until latest revision.
You may need to turn off fastboot to get it to boot from the usb stick.
It's not actually as multithreaded as I was expecting when doing things like parity/read checks etc, they take an age.
You can only have one 'storage array' with a max of 2 parity drives, think there are plans to allow for more than one array in a future update but no idea when that will come.
Intel/nvidia are overall better supported imo.

So why did I actually pick unraid:
Simply because it has better support for expanding your storage array and it's arguably lighter than truenas, you don't lose a drive for the os either...
The option to use different size drives even though I'm going with the same size from day 1.
Reviews seem to say overall it's easier than truenas
Something new to play with, worst case scenario the hardware I have can always run windows....

As to your questions:
Nothing obvious on the main array but there is a suggestion to have your vm's, along with things like your app data, on a dedicated 'ssd' drive(s) rather than the main array or cache drive(s)
The OS actually has some images for a range of VM's although I haven't looked too heavily into this yet.
Check your hardware is supported if you want to do gpu pass through etc.
 
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Say goodbye to your family because Unraid is a gateway drug into the world of homelabs and self-hosting :D

I've been running Unraid on a N54L for several years now, having flirted with WHS2011 for a short time before that. Set it up right, and it's literally set it and forget it. I think the longest I didn't check-in on it was around 9 months or so, it just worked.

Spaceinvader One's channel on YouTube is a good place to start, even though some of his getting started videos are a few years out of date and things may have changed since then. Ibracorp is another decent content creator, helped by a solid documentation library if that's more your thing.

The advice above to keep the array purely for storage and cache for docker/vm usage is very sound, couldn't agree more! My current config is:
  • 3x WD Red Plus's in XFS
    • 1x 8TB Parity
    • 2x 8TB Array
  • 1x Samsung SSD in ZFS
    • 1x 1TB Cache
Something to bear in mind that might not be obvious to new users, is that you have to boot Unraid off a flash disk so a motherboard with an inbuilt USB port or discreet external port on the case is essential. There are some recommendations on their official forum as there have been some flakey knock-offs doing the rounds that don't play nicely with Unraid's licensing checks.

Unraid has been a nice introduction to containerisation and Docker usage with their App marketplace and has helped me graduate to a full on Linux + Docker Compose setup on other hardware. The only compromise I've had to make is to scale back on running docker containers recently, but that's more to do my hardware not being cut out for it rather than Unraid itself.
 
DHR said:
VM wise how are you making sure they're resilient, backed up etc?
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Bearing in mind I've only dabbled with the VM side of things for HomeAssistant, so this might not be the smartest or most effective way to do things :)

There are a few community plug-ins and tools within the App store that can do the job of running a scheduled backup task of your appdata and VM img to a network destination of your choice. I was using one of the most common ones up to Nov last year where for some reason it kept crashing on me after a certain OS update. My triage didn't prove very useful but after migrating my cache drive to ZFS instead, I modified one of Spaceinvader's tutorials for a user scripted cron task so it takes nightly snapshots and saves them to another storage device on the same network, which seems to working as well as the original method did.
 
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I started with an N36L back in the day, I now run an SC847 as my primary with 36 bays, theres a certain irony to that I suppose.

If you'd like general advice, don't buy commercial grade hardware till you have to, a 23 drive Fractal Design Meshify XL chassis in storage mode will generally use a lot less power than the same hardware in a server chassis with a server PSU/backplanes/fans, it’s also more portable and will be easier to live with (heat/noise). Cache is better on an NVMe than AHCI/SATA, a mirror is better for redundancy, high endurance NAND can be cheap, I have drives with endurance my children will need to worry about. BTRFS is not your friend - it will bite you sooner rather than later. Intel is still the best option, anything around 8th gen onwards has the HD630 and that will do more transcodes than any non commercial provider needs. Never underestimate connectivity, hard wired clients that support H265/HEVC are worth upgrading to, especially if they can be hard wired. SpaceInvaderOne’s work is great, but sadly often outdated and in some cases incorrect, TrashGuide for example is the correct way to set up your shares for efficient moves. HBA’s are a great way of breaking out storage, but run hot, use a fan or a chassis with high CFM. Storage wise SATA supports spin down, a plugin should support SAS spin down, but no guarantees. Helium drives have obscene MTBF’s - read and learn how to convert drives to fully utilise capacity and enable cache as in the enterprise world, its often enabled by the controller rather than as default by the drive.You will always need more storage than you think, density is important, as is efficiency, but don't obsess over it. Buy a suitable UPS and test it - unplanned parity checks are bad, unplanned UPS failure can be even worse. I always move my USB drive to an internal header, adapters are cheap and it saves it being knocked or removed, don't buy Sandisk USB drives.

Unraid’s strength is in storage using mismatched drives and ease of expansion not its performance, its not comparable to VMWare or Proxmox in VM terms or TrueNAS in terms of resilience/IOPS, its got a very simple implementation of ZFS at best, if you want commercial best practice, consider something else, UR is about ease of use and firmly geared to the home user.
 
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I used to run Unraid on my HP Microserver Gen 8 until 18-months or so ago when I decommissioned the whole thing (was not 100% quiet and saving energy). I had the basic licence as I was only running 4 drives + Parity. Although I have bought a mini PC (Beelink U59 Pro) since to do server tasks I don't need it to have the same resilience with data, so I have just gone with Debian this time.

However if I was rebuilding something more complex Unraid would be one my first choices. Although I can't remember everything and there are some really good comments above, a few points I would also reiterate:

1. Can run different sizes of drives. Initially I had 4TB x 2 + 1TB x 2.
2. Very easy to add or change drives. I added a 2TB and another 4TB to replace the smaller drives.
3. Very easy (again) to change the Parity drive. I upgraded a small 256GB SSD to 1TB one. And it didn't take long at all.

I think it was the ease of swapping out drives and not worrying about data loss that stood out.
 
quackers said:
I've not used unraid and to be honest, it's the first time I've heard of it, but would something ZFS on ubuntu be better if you want to add / remove / snapshot drives etc?
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All depends on the planned usage case.

Want to host static content such as media on a bunch of drives bought as/when best £/TB with parity protection and can live with the IOPS of a single drive? UR parity is made for you. Want a fully scalable ZFS solution with much higher IOPS but reduced expansion flexibility and full ARC/cache control and understand the risks of multiple failures at acale and can plan/purchase/support accordingly? Then TNS or possibly Proxmox depending on your focus to use the storage.

In todays world, consider that a ZFS VDEV requires all drives to spin up for access, so one person accesses one file and the full VDEV needs to spin up, with UR thats a single drive, but again, different uses, different needs.
 
quackers said:
I've not used unraid and to be honest, it's the first time I've heard of it, but would something ZFS on ubuntu be better if you want to add / remove / snapshot drives etc?
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With recent updates, Unraid supports ZFS but you need identical drives if doing that.
 
The 30 day trial will essentially last forever if you don't stop the array or reboot the system, so you can try it out for longer than 30 days if you are careful!
 
As a newbie for Unraid I really relied heavily on watching spaceinvader videos on YouTube - I picked up a lot from that channel. The interface is really user friendly and was a great start while I was learning how to setup my first server.
 
I looked at all this and in the end just installed Ubuntu server with ZFS RAIDz2 for the drives (via an RAID card flashed to IT mode) and SMB to share the storage over the network. Easy enough to setup and pretty customisable. Then docker containers for most apps. It’s super reliable and I’ve left it running 24/7 and don’t spin the drives down based on the idea they may live longer that way versus spinning up and down constantly. Power usage is low but not fantastic - it’s just some old Ivy Bridge CPU I think so would benefit from upgrading at some point. I got the server second hand from the MM and it was in a rack mount style case. I wouldn’t recommend that unless you really want it as it’s one with an ATX PSU and getting them with a rear fan seems increasingly difficult. Especially modular designs.
 
Marky said:
As a newbie for Unraid I really relied heavily on watching spaceinvader videos on YouTube - I picked up a lot from that channel. The interface is really user friendly and was a great start while I was learning how to setup my first server.
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Be warned, some of his videos are significantly out of date and others don't follow best practice - trash guides for example cover share structure principles properly, dont follow SIO on this unless you like pointless wastes of time/write endurance.
 
TheMightyTen said:
Also be warned, it's leaked that Unraid are planning on moving to a subscription model, it's causing a fair bit of consternation in the community as at the moment hard facts are very thin on the ground.
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FFS. I'm sick of subs for everything now. What next, a bog roll sub?
 
TheMightyTen said:
Also be warned, it's leaked that Unraid are planning on moving to a subscription model, it's causing a fair bit of consternation in the community as at the moment hard facts are very thin on the ground.
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jaybee said:
FFS. I'm sick of subs for everything now. What next, a bog roll sub?
Click to expand...

It's annoying, but understandable. Once everyone who wants an Unraid subscription has one, then what? How do you continue to make money to invest in development?

It's the same with lifetime passes for Plex and the like - once the user base is saturated, you then have to switch to a different business model to continue to bring in money just to operate.
 
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