I'm planning on building a network attached storage to store files, including large VM files that I use in my workstation, and set up Plex, and I can't decide, so my question is simply why should I go with Unraid instead of FreeNAS?

Does Unraid can work like RAIDZ2?

Does Unraid actually uses ZFS? 

What's the typical read and write speeds (without caching)?

Even though, I may to use the same files store in the server every day, will I still benefit from caching?

What makes Unraid better than FreeNAS?

 

Thanks,

1 hour ago, mhweb said:

What makes Unraid better than FreeNAS?

Nothing that you are asking about. Unraid excels at using various different capacity drives in a single or double drive failure redundancy, and allowing drive additions without reconfiguring the entire pool.

 

It also has a huge variety of third party addons and a robust docker container and VM management interface proprietary to unraid.

 

If the only things you care about are the questions you asked, definitely the choice for you is FreeNAS.

1 hour ago, mhweb said:

Does Unraid can work like RAIDZ2?

Does Unraid actually uses ZFS? 

No and No

1 hour ago, mhweb said:

What's the typical read and write speeds (without caching)?

Read speed is the speed of a single disk, since each file is completely contained on a single disk (no striping).

Write speed is somewhat slower due to realtime parity updates.

 

Your questions completely miss some of the benefits of Unraid though.

• Each disk in Unraid is an independent filesystem that can be read by itself on any Linux (no striping as mentioned).
• Unraid lets you easily add disks without rebuilding the array, and lets you use different sized disks in the array.

1 hour ago, mhweb said:

Does Unraid actually uses ZFS? 

There is a plugin to allow you to use ZFS on unassigned disks

1 hour ago, mhweb said:

What makes Unraid better than FreeNAS?

 

To expand upon @trurl comment, 

 

8 minutes ago, trurl said:

• Each disk in Unraid is an independent filesystem that can be read by itself on any Linux (no striping as mentioned).

For myself this is the biggest thing.  When I started out researching what solution to use for my own storage, I was amazed and shocked that if the worst happened and I lost more drives than the redundancy could handle on a traditional RAID setup that I wouldn't just lose the data on the drives that failed, but I would lose absolutely every single file on the array with no chance of recovery.

 

Sure, read speed is affected by that because of no striping, but for me in a worst case scenario I'd rather lose a fraction of my files than lose every single one.  Maybe I'm just different, but I don't understand why anyone would gamble with losing everything than only losing some, especially since the size of many people's arrays prevent a complete 1:1 backup of it in the first place. 

Edited November 16, 20196 yr by Squid

Thank you for all the advice.

My only advice would be download a trial copy of unRAID on a USB stick and give it a go. Worst case you waste some time or you see the same awesome sauce we see. 😁