Unraid not working on Mac

[anesthetic-sausage1560]

Hi. I bought Unraid because i wanted to access and backup my files on both Mac and PC without getting file corruption issues caused by reading and writing to NTFS drives on my Mac using Paragon NTFS. During the trial period I copied my files to Unraid using my windows machine which went well. I briefly tested copying files to Unraid on my Mac which was slow. I thought this may be caused by the Paragon NTFS conversion process and would be solved after copying all my files on to Unraid on Windows and accessing them on my Mac without Paragon NTFS. Also I didn;t want to risk further file corruption when using Paragon NTFS. After the 30 day trial ended and I had copied my files I am now finding Unraid to be unusable on my Mac. It freezes my Monterey system and I have to pull the power plug to restart. I was under the impression that Unraid was compatible with both Windows and Mac but have found this to not be the case. I have tried to get help on the forums but have not yet received a solution. For me $129 is a lot of money to pay for a product that is useless to me and doesn't work as advertised.

[itimpi]

I am confused - Unraid should be running a server, not on your Mac.  Have I missed something?

[anesthetic-sausage1560]

Sorry if I was unclear Sir.

 

No I am not running Unraid on my Mac.

 

I have a separate computer which is running Unraid from a flash drive.

 

On my Windows PC I can access, copy or move files to and from the Unraid server without problems.

 

On the other hand my Mac computers freeze or become extremely slow when trying to access, copy or move files to and from the Unraid server.

 

I think you may have missed the fact that this has been an ongoing issue that has remained unresolved for years.

 

I think I missed the numerous threads from other people having the same issues I am now having.

 

[Espressomatic]

On 10/14/2023 at 4:21 PM, anesthetic-sausage1560 said:

On the other hand my Mac computers freeze or become extremely slow when trying to access, copy or move files to and from the Unraid server.

 

This is the behavior accessing Unraid shares from MacOS.  I've been running Unraid for over 5 years and this has always been the case, especially with SMB shares. It just doesn't work well and when it does work at all, the speed it pretty slow. This is with some 7 or 8 MacOS versions and three completely different Macs, plus always updating Unraid to latest/current versions. Accessing with a Windows system is reliable and pretty fast.

 

There's nothing you can do to improve the situation. No version of Unraid addresses these issues and there are no settings, patches, extra software or anything that will make any difference. The only solution to fast SMB shares from MacOS is to use another NAS instead of Unraid. If you set up a Windows system and share its folders as SMB you'll see how fast it can be.

I typically use NFS because SMB can't be used with the Mac on Unraid. It's not great, but at least it somewhat works.

Edited October 17, 2023 by Espressomatic

[faxxe71]

I cant confirm.

I use an Unraid server in my personal home network.

2 x Mac  Mini M1 each with a 10GB Nic (and few M$ boxes as well).

 

Both can move and copy from/to this Unraid box with full 10GB speed (to the NVME cache drive).

Both can use the Server for their time machine backups.

Very reliable and completely stable since i start with Unraid a year ago.

 

Important are the smb settings: here are mine:

interfaces = 192.168.1.254;capability=RSS,speed=10000000000
aio read size = 1
aio write size = 1
strict locking = No
use sendfile = No
server multi channel support = Yes
readdir_attr:aapl_rsize = no
readdir_attr:aapl_finder_info = no
readdir_attr:aapl_max_access = no
fruit:posix_rename = yes
fruit:metadata = stream

I would say, there are no problems with MacOS.

 

-faxxe

 

Edited October 18, 2023 by faxxe71

[anesthetic-sausage1560]

Thanks for your replies. They highlight the widely opposing experiences mac users have with Unraid.

 

From my own experience and after wading through numerous comments from the past several years I have come to the conclusion that:

 

Unnraid works for some and not for others.

 

There is no guarantee that the time you put into setting it up will pay off.

 

I have tried various smb configurations and mac tweaks from the forums that improved the transfer rate and

freezing issues a little but caused weird behaviour when renaming files.

 

After over a month of Unraid tinkering and googling, I've moved on to using Windows 10 with drivepool as my file server.

I can now transfer files at high speeds from both Mac and Windows machines,

It was very easy to set up and I didn't have to spend precious time learning a new operating system.

 

I really wanted Unraid to work with my setup but I can't afford to waste any more time on it.

 

[ChannelD]

From experience SMB settings need to be tweaked on both the Mac and the UnRaid box so they align for optimal efficiency. Have a look at the thread “optimal smb setting when using a Mac”. 
Agree out of the box UnRaid and a Mac was disappointing for me too. Here is a video on how I solved it “UnRaid NAS MacOS SMB SAMBA settings you need” on YouTube. 

Edited October 31, 2023 by ChannelD

[Jase]

On 10/17/2023 at 1:16 PM, Espressomatic said:

 

This is the behavior accessing Unraid shares from MacOS.  I've been running Unraid for over 5 years and this has always been the case, especially with SMB shares. It just doesn't work well and when it does work at all, the speed it pretty slow. This is with some 7 or 8 MacOS versions and three completely different Macs, plus always updating Unraid to latest/current versions. Accessing with a Windows system is reliable and pretty fast.

 

There's nothing you can do to improve the situation. No version of Unraid addresses these issues and there are no settings, patches, extra software or anything that will make any difference. The only solution to fast SMB shares from MacOS is to use another NAS instead of Unraid. If you set up a Windows system and share its folders as SMB you'll see how fast it can be.

I typically use NFS because SMB can't be used with the Mac on Unraid. It's not great, but at least it somewhat works.

This is so annoying! Why is there no way to fix this? Is it up to Unraid OS or Mac OS? Why do Mac's work fine with 10GB on other systems?

[CasaP]

Anyone still having MacOS issues, I would suggest the separate smb-fruit.conf file approach as shown here;

 

 

After I did this, everything just worked and it is fast as hell...