Welcome aboard, brother. I’m really looking forward to your future unraid content helping to grow the community.

You should have probably set the ssd as a cache then set appdata to be on cache as preferred. Not an unraid expert but I think that's how it's designed.

You can get around the issue you had with Truenas Scale by going into Advanced settings in the Apps tab and unticking "Enable Host Path Safety Checks". This allows the apps to start up after a reboot and also have a SMB share for the same location. 😉

You should update at 2:50 that now it is priced per year if you want updates, sooo even more expensive.

Been running unraid for over a year. I haven’t had a lot of time to dig deeper so I am excited for you to make more content on it.

Great news! I'm always looking out for more Unraid content. I've been using it for almost a year, and it has been great so far.

Spaceinvader says hi😂. I spent two years on unRAID, but for my docker apps the high availability was important. Running them in a HA ceph proxmox cluster. For media and data i have two truenas system. Never looked back to unRAID, although I don't have anything again just don't miss it too much. The biggest advantage the random size hard disks you can just add to your pools.

I would use the nvme as cache drive and for selective shares (e.g. download) configure the "Use cache pool (for new files/directories)" setting so that new downloads go to the cache by default. Mover will then transfer files to the array (depending on the setting selected). For the share that contains VM files, one could set it up for "prefer cache" to keep the VM disk on the cache if there's space and increase performance. Ideally of course, one would want multiple cache drives for redundancy. If only one cache disk, ensure that it's not used for critical data or back up content separately. I keep my appdata on the cache, but use "CA Backup / Restore Appdata" from the community store to back up the app configs and data.

Been using unRAID for a couple of years now and I love how versatile it is. Also love how it simplifies Docker for a smooth-brain like myself and keeps everything in AppData for persistent data/config. I have seen there have been issues with certain USB3.0 flash drives but I've had no problems with a 4GB USB2.0 stick I ripped out of a dead Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4 PoE. It's great they now support ZFS. Got a large pool full of Linux ISO's to stream via Plex!

I bought the Plus version of Unraid and love it!

Been using unRAID for two years now and I don’t regret it at all.

Hi Techhut, great video as always, keep up the good work.

I ran Truenas for two years but switched to Unraid. Been running it for about 4 years now and currently have a main server and a second for testing.

I started with UNRAID, originally because I was running a dual gaming system, then I played around with TrueNas Core and Scale as an ISCSI target with some 10G links. So far I'm kind of split between the two because there are aspects of both I want... So far here are my conclusions: Neither solution will outperform a hardware RAID controller. Yes they use caching to mask how bad it is, but when doing large transfers they're both underwhelming in my experience. TrueNas has a great UI for configuring ISCSI targets (although more tuning options would be nice) Rebuilding a degraded pool is easier in TrueNas, and it's nice knowing you can easily import/ export your pools if you need to. Networking UI is better in TrueNas IMO Raw drive performance appears to be better in TrueNas. I'm guessing this is because of the way blocks are distributed with ZFS. TrueNas won't let you use a RAID controller, which wouldn't be as big a pain if they would provide more resource tuning options, like how much of your CPU you want to use towards IO. You have to sacrifice a bunch of drives to the ZFS gods just to get some decent sustained throughput. If you want decent performance with TrueNas, you better have a bunch of flash laying around. 2 NVME drives to improve reads, 2 for ISCSI writes, 2 more for metadata? Dedup? Good lord. UNRAID lets you pass through your hardware RAID controller which is nice if you don't care about using what's "recommended" and just want committed HDD writes sometime this week. All in all they're both cool, but neither is complete. Despite my rant, I'm actually very impressed with how far they have come in the last few years. If you were to mesh the best parts of both, you'd have a damn good array. Great video by the way. I made sure to drop a like :)

4yrs in using unraid and still loving it.

Im definitely an unraid fanboy, I used em all in my homelab, truenas, OMV and proxmox. I still use Truenas as a backup to my unraid. I like the forum support and the GUI interface, I just think it’s well thought out and works! Plus you can add disks of any size to the array

Hi. Great video! And nice decision - Unraid is the way to go. But just an advise, it's not recommended to use NVME drives within the Array. Use it as a cache drive.

unraid is a lot better than synology or any raid solution in energy consumption, and I love that!

useing my nvme drive as a cache drive and then putting the appdata share on cache works really well for me instead of adding it to the array directly

Welcome to Unraid! I've been using it as my primary homelab server environment for about 4 years now - it runs my NAS as well as all of my container and VM network services (including my media with Emby). I've been thrilled with it. I dabbled a bit in Proxmox, TrueNas and others but always find myself coming back to Unraid. FYI - in your Share settings, you don't need to set both Included Disks and Excluded Disks. Anything not selected in Included Disks is excluded automatically (and vice-versa).

It was my process too. Truenas, omv but I'm about to settle on unraid too. Great timing 😂

I'm an unraider since a few months ago. It's great, docker setups are a total breeze (I know how to do so with docker-compose but this is super simple) and the plugins and support is excellent. Also a very good VM manager. The licence is lifetime and I would recommend highly that anyone who wants to use it takes advice from unraid forums and Limetech themselves to try to only go with recommended usb stciks, I found that out just recently! It was an absolute breeze to keep my disk config, transfer to new usb stick and get licence for the new stick (took 1 minute by email)

Honestly, I prefer Kubernetes. I know it's complicated and stuff, but in my scenario of mixed applications, I can truly share the computing power of differently configured nodes for different applications centralized into a cluster. Maybe it's so comfortable to me because I use it all the time in my full-time job and UNRAID seemed too... limiting for me. But I surely understand that this is a sweet spot for homelab enthusiast that combines simplicity, convenience and a lot of possibilities.

i haven't been able to justify buying an actual NAS device. I plug USB drives into main computer and share that :P I'm completely hosed if the disk dies though... Thanks for the great overview of Unraid :)

Nice to see some Unraid here, currently I'm using both Unraid and TrueNAS Scale and they're great :) Question though, why did you set your SSD in the Array instead of using a Pool? AFAIK, Arrays don't properly support SSDs yet, or at least it was never recommended since they don't have TRIM scheduled (you might get degraded performance and lifespan over time), you're not taking advantage of their speed all the time and you'll need to micromanage all your shares and paths to use or not use the SSD "disk". It's always recommend to use a Pool for you SSDs instead, and take advantage of the native caching, Mover, etc UserShare features Unraid already provides. Pools also support BTRFS RAID modes, so you can create a Mirror Pool.

Did you ever do the video covering everything you did here? Really curious to understand some of this better.

I'm considering building a home NAS and leaning toward Unraid for it. I was already torn between Unraid and TrueNAS Scale, but learning that TrueNAS Scale basically forces the use of k3s rather than Docker Engine pretty much decided me.

@TechHut Your VMs (/mnt/cache/domains/) and docker (/mnt/cache/appdata/) wil automagically and always use SSD/NVMe storage if you have this disk assigned as the Cache drive. This works because of these shares having Cache:Yes setting.

Why not use that NVMe as a Cache pool? You can still run VMs/Docker from it, but also use it as a cache when writing from the LAN. Would be better if drive is larger, but still...

Your video convinced me to try out TrueNAS scale. All I can say is it’s truly amazing as a NAS. It’s not so good at running apps, but hey, they video about choosing a NAS, not an app server . Am I right? I run apps on PCs, VPS, and rpi’s , and I let the NAS specialize in NAS’ing.

Why did you put the nvme in with the array and not use it separately as a Cache or other Pool? It's a lot cleaner if you separate it out.Then set it as the default drive for Docker/VM's etc

Why are you not using the nvme for cache drive?

Good video.

Unraid license is tied to an individual flash drive?? How long will you be down when that flash drive fails?

Man could you make a how to video on managing containers on unraid, im new to containers idea, great video

How are the read/write speeds for you? I really like the unraid UI but I'm worried about the read and write speeds being limited. Considering either unraid for an old 4790k computer i have or getting some ecc capable hardware for truenas or just get a Synology for main NAS and use the old computer for unraid for backups.

Did you put together the hardware you're running this on? I'd be interested in a video on that.

thought he would discuss the hardware he used.

Hey can someone help me with this please. I want to switch to unraid by converting an old PC. That old PC is currently what houses all my HDDs connected with Microsoft Storage Spaces. How do I convert it to unread without losing all my existing data? How did TechHut convert to unraid without losing all his data?

So what hardware are you using to serve Plex now?

Can you show us how to set up NextCloud AIO on unraid? I would literally pay money for assistance in getting this running. I’ve tried a few times and always get stuck with a file size limit at 1GB. I don’t know why or how to fix it.

I would like enable docker on the latest Unraid, but I'm unsure to choose between ipvlan or macvlan.

How do you get on with that Terramaster?

Just curious about your NAS case (the cover pic one). I'm prepare my home server recently. Your case is soooo good for my usage. Thanks! ❤

Hello and good day. I am interested in your hardware configuration. It is difficult to find a suitable NAS enclosure that supports a large motherboard and many hard drive bays. Can you please add your configuration in the description of the video? Thank you.

Stupid question but can't you just setup a NAS in Proxmox?

Greetings from another Pacific Northwesterner! Glad you have jumped on the UNRAID train. Been a fan of it myself for awhile now. Sounds like I have followed a similar path looking for a NAS/Media server solution for the homelab. Started with TrueNas Core, which worked great, but in the end I found its FreeBSD underpinnings just different enough from Linux that it got in the way of my learning curve, LOL. Did the OMV thing as well, but for some reason, I never quite warmed to the interface. With UNRAID I have found a pretty ideal solution for my needs and hardware. I still prefer to use Proxmox for my VMs, mostly because I found hardware passthrough easier with that platform than with UNRAID, at least with the kit I have. There is one issue I have been monitoring on my UNRAID server that you may wish to keep an eye on as well. I am seeing nearly constant (very small) writes to my cache drive pool, that seem to be a product of chatty dockers. Plex seems to be the worst offenderopn my system, but others seem to be contributing to the situation as well. The constant writes seem to keep the cache drives from going into standby, which I would expect, since this server is otherwise not very busy. The concern of course is the long-term health of the drives. I have added the extra parameters "--no-healthcheck" to the noisiest docker configs, and it does seem to help some, but still seeing more writes than I would expect. It would be interesting to know if you or any other viewers are experiencing something similar, or if a workable solution is found. Love your content. Keep up the great work!

Welcome. All roads lead to Unraid 🙏🤣

intel celeron N5105?! omg that must be a slow NAS, and a nvme in the array?! omg

I was gonna try it but it wouldnt let me virtualize it. Tying it to a USB key boot drive is stupid IMO.

Nice YT, have you checked out CasaOS?

You should not have a ssd in the Arras with hard drives. Array parity might not work for you if any drive fail. Ssd should be cache.

no cache drives?

OMG! please tell me it has a dark mode that you didn't activate, I'm now snowblind from trying to watch this.

Why nvme is in array ?

I switched drives No customer support call

Just to clarify you can easily change your license for Unraid to a new drive yourself or within an hour by contacting support. You can change the usb key license yourself through self service once per year.

Unraid is great for software but for speed and reliability maybe use open-zfs or other nas on your lan? For example : everything is run as root and all files and folders belong to nobody : users

Where is your parity drive??? update: it's there, just missed it

TrueNAS is free, but you get what you pay for.

i tried unraid and hated it.

its not reccomended to have an ssd in your array with a parity drive active......

You actually trust the USB stick? I've seen too many of those die unexpectedly....

8 Gigs of RAM, wow

I'll stick to Proxmox.

Seems like a backwards step to me.

This all seem sooo, noobish friendly. Yea its easy, if thats what you are looking for your homelab. But you are missing most of the "lab" thing. No proper hypervisor, no hands-on pretty much anywhere

What? The problem you had can be solved with a simple checkbox (unchecking "Validate Hostpath", which has now been removed completely, based on user feedback). And you are telling us, you moved to a system, that doesn't allow you to create more than 1 disk array, gives you zero control over its configuration and (at the time of posting this video) did not yet support ZFS? Ridiculous reasoning.

Pay for a for a NAS software ... NOPE!

I don’t get it.. why not just install Linux ?

First

so Unraid is not only paid but also closed source, right? and this is what is advertised here, yes?

Gone are the days of unraid pay once now your going to be paying yearly. Subscriptions are stupid don't use unraid.

OS running off USB… really? That alone is enough to put me off. I do like this channel, but this particular review isn’t up to the normal standard. Moving from OpenMediaVault to UnRaid would be a retrograde step for many users. The fact is, they each do rather different things, which you don’t really cover :(

Unraid license stuck to USB hahahaha People avoid software that runs off USB, they die far to often, even $100 USBs....

Ah, alright, Unraid is for the absolute newbies, and for people who is not able or willing to learn.

Unraid is garbage. Not the actual software, but the company behind it. Locking your license to a USB is asking for trouble and what many don't know is if your USB dies, you'll have to buy another license. It's like a pyramid scheme. I prefer Proxmox for all my VMs and also use TrueNAS Scale and have absolutely no issues.

Unraid is becomming a Subscription Modell btw! @TechHut

lol hard drives + nvme in the array hahaha, seems like you don't know how to use unraid