My Experience After 3 Weeks

[hendrst1]

Initial set-up was easy (but make sure your hardware is working).

 

Performance (read/write speed) generally as expected but will vary depending on your hardware.   (Do turn on the faster write setting in disk settings for large initial writes).

 

Plug-ins work well but some can cause instability so check them out on the forums before installing.  Same for Dockers, I presume, but I haven't tried any yet.  Otherwise OS appears pretty stable.

 

If you are a Mac OS user, Time Machine apparently works for some but not others (me).

 

Power consumption remains a significant issue.  If repurposing an old PC  (Intel core2duo 2.66Ghz, 4GB ram, 4hdd+2SSD) like I am, my power usage ranges from 90 watts at idle (drives spun down) to 126 in normal active usage.   That is about triple the usage of some of the 2-/4bay  home commercial NAS' from Synology/QNAP or a Mac mini.   I presume there are some PCs out there that use much less power; if I could find one I would prefer that with Unraid over those proprietary commercial boxes.

 

So, still testing and learning and looking for energy efficient hardware.

 

[SpencerJ]

1 hour ago, hendrst1 said:

Power consumption remains a significant issue.  If repurposing an old PC  (Intel core2duo 2.66Ghz, 4GB ram, 4hdd+2SSD) like I am, my power usage ranges from 90 watts at idle (drives spun down) to 126 in normal active usage.

 

thanks for trying us out and reporting back with your experience. If you haven't found this already, here are some tips and best practices for energy efficiency;

 

https://unraid.net/blog/energy-efficient-server

[hendrst1]

How did I miss that document?   Thank you.

 

PS: I liked what I actually saw and bought a license.

Edited February 22, 2023 by hendrst1

[hendrst1]

I just shutdown the Unraid server to take a peak at the BIOS power management settings.   The UPS reading now indicate that my 15 year old pc is only using 36-72 watts so not so bad.   I must have known what I was doing when I originally assembled it back in 2008.  Ha.

[SpencerJ]

2 minutes ago, hendrst1 said:

I just shutdown the Unraid server to take a peak at the BIOS power management settings.   The UPS reading now indicate that my 15 year old pc is only using 36-72 watts so not so bad.   I must have known what I was doing when I originally assembled it back in 2008.  Ha.

 

Nice- that's not bad at all. If you need to upgrade hardware in the future, there should be some good places to find power consumption info on different components in that blog. There are also lively discussions about all of this in the Hardware, Motherboards and CPUs, etc sections of the Community Forum.

[DivideBy0]

Yes the TimeMachine not working is a deal killer for me but I am already invested in UnRaid, can't just switch. Really disappointing as I have around 7 Macs in my house.  I switch back to an old MacMini with an external 8TB drive that I backup to UnRaid. 

[itimpi]

7 minutes ago, johnwhicker said:

Yes the TimeMachine not working is a deal killer for me but I am already invested in UnRaid, can't just switch. Really disappointing as I have around 7 Macs in my house.  I switch back to an old MacMini with an external 8TB drive that I backup to UnRaid. 

Have you tried the Time Machine docker?   Several people have reported that it works for them.

[DivideBy0]

2 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Have you tried the Time Machine docker?   Several people have reported that it works for them.

 

I tried EVERYTHING and I think I am pretty fluent with IT. Nothing worked and all my Ventura machines stoped working after 6.11.1 upgrade. Several posts here and reddit are calling the same issues. I wish UnRaid will put some focus on this issue and I understand we're the mercy of Apple here as they constantly changing their code. 

[murkus]

I had given up on it half a year ago, after upgrading to 6.11. it was broken, so I thought. I gave it a shot now with 6.12.2 with what I think made the substantial difference: I now use a "disk share" instead of a regular "user share". Disk shares may not yet be enabled on your unraid installation and this can be done in "Global share settings". The disk share has a size limit for timemachine. I don't see any substantial drawbacks of using a disk share as compared to a user share, if you plan to have you macOS backups all on one disk anyway. The SHFS user file system turns out to come with a lot of performance overhead and I have stopped using it for any shares for backup solutions.

 

I am using the unraid TimeMachine that is included with the OS, not the TimeMachine container. I had tried the container in the past and that was also not successful for me. I removed all custom tweaks for SMB, I am using the stock SMB config that 6.12 comes with.

 

TimeMachine now is not perfect, but it works: The inital backup stopped like 4-5 times and I had to restart it. The whole process took 2-3 days until the initial backup did conclude successfully. Starting new differential backups works fine.

 

I don't know yet whether the verification will be successful, as it is currently running. If it fails I will provide an update here.