Unraid on old iMac?

[pipdango]

I'm trying out Unraid for the first time and am hoping to use it on one of my old macs with a external hard drive enclosure. I've made the bootable USB (and tested it on a PC), but I can't get it to work on either my 2008 iMac or my 2014 Macbook Pro. I've been able to get the bootable USB to show up using a bootloader (rEFIned and Clover both work), but both freeze when I try to boot into Unraid.

 

Am I doing something wrong or is this not compatible with mac hardware?

[trurl]

Don't know about Mac but unless that external enclosure has SAS/SATA connections to the computer for each disk you may have some performance and stability issues. 

[pipdango]

Yea, I understand it's not going to be the fastest thing, but I don't need it to be fast and I'm trying to make use of old hardware. I might be getting a newer used Mac (free) for this purpose that would be faster, but if Unraid doesn't work on Mac hardware, then I won't bother.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, trurl said:

performance and stability issues

If that enclosure is USB you may have other problems besides just speed.

 

To keep the array in sync, you must have permanent connections to the disks. USB often fails on this score. When a disk disconnects, it will have to be rebuilt. And this may be a frequent problem with USB.

 

If you don't use parity, then nothing to keep in sync but of course no redundancy either.

[pipdango]

That's great to know! Given that it only has USB 2.0, I dug out an old Firewire800 enclosure that I was going to try out if I can get it to boot.

[pipdango]

Does anyone else have experience booting Unraid on Mac hardware? It seems possible given that @SpaceInvaderOne did it here:  https://youtu.be/kdnL5_y0Jak

[pipdango]

Update: While booting off a rEFInd USB stick on a 2014 MBP, I get past the freezing stage, but now I get a pile of text and a kernel panic.