I was thinking the other day, Unraid has come a long way since its inception, evolving from a simple NAS solution into a powerful platform for all sorts like media servers, virtualisation, self hosting, automation, and so much more.

 

But I’m curious, what’s everyone’s main use case in 2025?

 

Are you running VMs, hosting game servers, experimenting with AI, or maybe even doing a bit of everything? So please vote and let us know in the comments if you’ve got a unique setup!

Everything, however for me y hardware is getting old and some of the newer implemented technology I miss out

But yeah it has come a long way.

Irritating me!

A little bit of everything. NAS, Game Service, Docker Services, experimenting in Virtual Machines, Plex of course. With the electricity prices the uptime is getting kinda expensive, but I haven't found hardware with enough PCI lanes to replace my Threadripper  

A little bit of everything (no Gaming)

but the main points are 

-NAS

-Windows VM

-Docker

 

 

I got Immich running as a secondary photo "backup" setup.

Its primary use case is for Movies and TV shows with Plex, but also recently my ever growing music collection.

I voted NAS, as that is it's main role. However it's grown well past that, media server has become full blown media library with Plex serving and Tdarr transcoding, now with Immich and home assistant, camera DVR etc. Looking at a GPU upgrade for my gaming rig and thinking the old GPU will go into the server so I can mess around with some self hosted/privacy AI.

 

Unraid was my first step outside of Windows gaming PC building, and now I build my own OPNSense boxes. I also never thought at the time I first built my Unraid server that it would grow to the point I was hosting my own camera roll photos because big tech cant help but spy on EVERYTHING about you.

Currently, I use Unraid as a docker hub integration.

I can easily test new dockers, build dockers and push them with a few commands here and there.

It is with these script on this test bench unraid That I maintain and update the Repo Docker That i publish to the CA.

Original Unriad Server duties for me where.

ssh sftp file sharing, Samba windows workgroup acces, and Plex Docker for media content sharing.

Unriad is my file NAS system first and docker second. Having had 3 systems at one time. it was a type of clustering to share and move data between multiple machines.