Unraid Review After 5 Months


moejama

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I migrated from a Windows 10 server to Unraid 6 back in April. Initial setup wasn't bad, though moving a large library over efficiently and safely did require me to figure out some paths and remember some Linux command line commands which I don't use much.

 

My server hard is just consumer and ASRock - B75M R2.0, Xeon® CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz, 8 Gigs Ram, some passive Geforce video card since it don't have onboard video with the Xeon. This is all just stuff I had laying around. The mobo has like 8 SATA ports so there is no SATA expansion and I think clearly spending more on bigger drives is the best way to deal with that as well as future proofing yourself and just making your life easier. My drives are 5 WD REDs and two old Samsung and WD Green 2 gigs that I threw in for fun, because hey I have parity. I don't have a big need for VMs, so that's more than enough ram for my dockers and file serving needs. If I start using VMs more I will need more ram or even a mobo/platform upgrade. 

 

Unfortunately, for me, I was migrating right at a time when Plex was having issues with transcoding inside a docker or something, so that actually wound up taking more time troubleshooting and than the entire rest of the migration project combined. That probably wound up being 30+ hours of troubleshooting because of how the problem cropped up right in the middle of transition so I was not obvious like most problems. I had some problems with the combination of PLEX's transcoding on the cache drive and SabNZB really lagging the server during post processing. I moved Plex transcoding off the cache and just gave it a direct drive assignment, like this /mnt/disk6/transcode/. I also switched the NzbGet which simply points to downloads with cache set to preferred. 

 

My lan transfer rates range from 45-120 MB/s depending on what drive and SATA ports I'm pulling from. That's about as good as I can expect without high end hardware.


I'm running dockers for Plex, rtorrent connected to VPN with proxify routing Couchpotato and Sonarr as well as working as my home proxy server works great. I don't use the torrent side much, but it works great as a proxiy for my VPN. I used the LinuxServer dockers for most stuff and Binhex for rtorrent. It took some time to figure out that's the easy way to do it, but once I did it only took a couple minutes to setup. It took many hours however, to figure out that was the way to easily get VPN setup and solve any routing complexities. 
 

I occasionally use Krusader to manage some content manually, but I don't like it much. That bring up one of the bigger weaknesses of Unraid when it comes to easy management, no built in GUI based file management. I think that would also be nice during migration from one file system to another. 

 

I still have some occasional permissions problems where a file will require me to run the permissions fix script in order to my SMB user permissions to allow me to move/delete it. 

 

I didn't preclear my drives, I was in a rush and I'm a rebel!

 

Beyond the initial setup and Plex transcoding issue it's been smooth sailing. I'm at 113 days uptime with zero reported errors. The response to the security issues in the general Linux community has been fast. The updates have been painless. Autoupdating dockers and plugins have caused no problems. rtorrrents VPN proxify setup stays connected and working great, so I'm not looking like a endpoint to a bunch of known questionable endpoints reoccurring at predictable intervals anymore. That's nice :)

 

The interesting part is I'm running the exactly the same hardware that Windows 10 was unstable on, but I also did a full rebuild to a new case (using the same hardware). Perhaps I made something stable in the process of re-assembly or the additional cooling helped a lot, or maybe Windows + Drive Pool just wasn't as stable. I was going to buy a new mobo, but I decided to try a Linux solution to see if that was the problem. 

 

I would like a better visual based file explorer that is more fit to the job of managing Unraid because as it stands I'm managing files using SMB. Even web simple based management would be more secure than that because it wouldn't involve cross platform permissions. A well targeted malware might exploit Unraid's reliance on SMB. Considering the power of the Unraid web interface. It's safe to say if someone gets into the web interface, they can wipe you out, so.. I think I would like a web based file explorer that lets you move/delete/rename/maybe change permissions and other basic stuff specifically for Unraid. 

 

I'm happy with my investment though. It has made my existing hardware significantly more stable and reduced management time. I could have set this up as a linux distro with dockers, but I prefer the web based nature for the sake of management and a more unified purpose built package. Plus I didn't have to spend weeks testing various drive pool configurations and potentially put my library at greater risk in the process since I don't have a spare server with 15+ TB of space just sitting around. 

 

If your time is worth money and you need a file server/appliance that also requires CPU power for transcoding or VMs. I would say Unraid is a pretty solid option.  It's proven quite stable on hardware that I didn't even that was all that stable. Performance is consistent. Maintenance is very easy and the level of compartmentalization means it's not only easier to backup and restore, it's simply more resistant to catastrophic corruption. Less monolithic kernels = less change of massive failure, imo.

 

Thanks for the awesome product Unraid Team!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by moejama
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Curious what you didn't like about Krusader. Very easy and functional file manager. Using the plugin that allows you to install it on a dedicated unRaid tab, it is as good as a standard feature.

 

I run a Windows VM as my primary workstation on the unRaid server. An advantage is being able to access the underlying drives at full speed. So I rarely use Krusader, but I think it is a very good tool.

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I've always preferred Krusader over the mapped drive options, I've not used MC since running headless but will SSH and try that option. Although I do remember preferring Krusader to mc initially. 

 

Moejama, have you setup Krusader to operate smoothly, I followed a guide and it helped. 

 

Thanks for a breakdown and sharing your experiences. It's awesome :)

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