My thoughts on UNRAID from a noobs perspective.


questionbot

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Hi... I've been knocking about the forums for a few weeks asking a lot of stupid questions and wanted to give a quick feedback to the community about my experience with UNRAID.

 

I'm not a massively technical kind of guy. I'm a visual effects artist and use my computers mainly for making video game cinamatics. I'm telling you that as I want to stress I am not a tech guy, I consider myself an artist. That being said I have been using computers all my life and I am older than the majority of people I meet on forums like this, as in I saw Star War in the cinema old.

 

I wanted to build a proper server in my house to serve as a file server for my texture, mesh, material and all my other archives I use at work so I would be able to stop using a external drive system. Just have eveything online always. I also wanted to be able to move into 4K. 4K animation requires HUGE amounts of space. So file archive, render locations, editing, colour grading.. all through a networked server. In addition I also wanted a full media server. I was sick of having to copy media files to a transport USB and then plugging that directly into a given device. Using JellyFin or Plex (This is what I ended up using) to be able to stream to any device in the house is just amazing.

 

So that was my "needs".

 

I built a sever from scratch specifically for this. I was stumped right out of the gate by UNraid not working at all. Turns out the newer processors or something need the beta version. Installing the beta (6.9.0-beta25) got it up and running.. even so.. this was not a good first impression. I'm lucky someone answered my post so quickly as I was already setting up a boot usb for OPenMediaServer when I read the solution of switching to the beta.

 

Using Unraid took a lot to get started. I had run some test servers on old hardware using a variety of OS types. I tired OpenMediaServer, Ubuntu Server and Debian. I was reluctant to move to something like OpenMediaServer / Unraid / FreeNAS as I liked the idea of having a "normal" OS. Something I was comfortable with. I ended up choosing a "data server" specific software as I felt it was no point in reinventing the wheel. Surly much more tech savy dudes have solved all my issues in these software like OpenMediaServer that I would run into.

 

I chose UNraid mainly for the disk management of the array. OpenMediaServer was the other one I almost chose (I liked that it was debian based) Still, money is always tight for a family man and other systems had no real support beyond maybe using zfs or something or used robust raids that really ate into your total disk space. Being able to just add more drives as I install them and the parity drive thing allowing me to use more space for my data or applications really was the main reason I choose UNraid. IMO, this should be plastered all over UNraids advertising, it really was the "thing" that no one else had and tipped the scales. As a non-tech guy I need clear tutorials and instructions as I lack the actual understanding to make decisions about things myself. @SpaceInvaderOne was 100% vital to not only choosing Unraid. If I didn't see some of his tutorials telling me exactly how to do something, I probably would have gone with a Debian Server or OpenMediaServer, despite drive thing. So SpaceInvader and the drive thing are the combo that sold me. Almost everything I googled for that I wanted to do was in a spaceinvader tutorial.

 

The work stuff was almost plug and play. I just installed UNRAID and setup the array made the shares... and bang.. network was done. Blew my mind. Laptop, Desktop, Workstation, my phones and tablets... everything connected and worked literally the 1st time I tried. Awesome.

 

The media stuff was harder as I had to learn about what a docker was and what a VM was and stuff. I'm still not using any VMs all my apps are in docker. I'm using Binhex and Linux.IO in all cases. I found this part of Unriad confusing. There seems to be a lot of assumed knoledge and I can not find any real documentation apart from the wiki and the "?" button in the OS. I often found myself lost without a way to make ti work. I ended up using trail and error in many cases. Even so.. I have almost everything working that I want to. I still want HTTPS on my web acess and secure media streaming.

 

Going from not knowing anything to..

  • File Server for work
  • OpenVPN tunnel to access shares anywhere my laptop is.
  • Private DropBox Type thing
  • Schedualed and User clicked backups across the net to the server
  • Full Internet PVR for Film / TV / Comics / Ebooks / Music
  • Media Streaming with Plex

 

I feel that even with my issues it was so fast getting all this running.. I think my biggest issue with UNraid is not knowing WHAT I can do with it. There are probably things I would love to run on it, but just do not know them.

 

I purchased Unraid today and wanted to thank everyone involved in this project. It really is a great bit of software and I love how it is usable from a noobish guy more comfortable with a pencil and a eraser than code blocks in hax.

 

I also want to shoutout to the forum community on reddit and here. Everyone was very helpful and I got almost no blow back for spamming all my questions.

 

--QuestionBot

 

PS - I'm still fiddling.. sorry, but my forum posts will probably keep coming :)

 

Edited by questionbot
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2 hours ago, questionbot said:

I am older than the majority of people I meet on forums like this, as in I saw Star War in the cinema old.

I wouldn't count on that. This forum has a rather high percentage of 50+

 

The tone of this forum has a lot to do with the number of years of computer experience that are reflected here.

 

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