mhweb Posted November 16, 2019 Share Posted November 16, 2019 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, Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted November 16, 2019 Share Posted November 16, 2019 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. Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted November 16, 2019 Share Posted November 16, 2019 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. Quote Link to comment
Squid Posted November 16, 2019 Share Posted November 16, 2019 (edited) 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, 2019 by Squid Quote Link to comment
mhweb Posted November 17, 2019 Author Share Posted November 17, 2019 Thank you for all the advice. Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted November 25, 2019 Share Posted November 25, 2019 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. 😁 1 Quote Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.