Hey guys,
I was wondering if anyone could explain what exactly unRAID is and why it is so hyped. As far as I can make out it's just a linux distro with a custom kernel with KVM support and a fancy web interface. Is this correct or have I been misinformed?
They also seem to reinvent RAID4. No, it's not even a RAID, it's a JBOD with a parity drive. Instead of striping data, it's just "Dear VM, here's your disk, enjoy your 100 iops, and btw, if some other disk fails, we'll thrash your IO with read requests anyway because, you know, parity". It's retarded.
And this crap is hyped, you say? By whom?
"Parity", LOL. https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=53445.0
Its hyped because of ease of use and they have a marketing department unlike most distros. Linus is more than happy to take their money and advertise for it....
Going with FreeNAS or Rockstor is a better route if you are going to be building a NAS. If you want a truly out of the box NAS, Synology, QNAP or Theacus are the way to go
Xenserver, SmartOS, ESXI or Proxmox are all better than it for VMs and homelab type servers.
Oh I'm not looking to use it. I'd probably roll my own from a linux server base if I was intending on running a NAS.
I was just curious as to why I see people recommending it so much when to me it seems like burning money.
I suspect the other reason that Linus uses it is that they give him tech support. Dude couldn't use a toaster without an hour long call to the toaster company tech support.
Exactly plus money for sure. Linus is an idiot and I dont think they have a real tech guy on staff. unRaid is more marking hype and ease of use than tech awesome.
I have watched/read their sites base storage custom method and Im as a layman tinge a little. Data is stored on a single drive so speed would be an issue. It all about making pass through easier for a layman like me.
Charging a yearly fee for this is crap. Id rather learn it myself and use a better storage solution.
In my opinion, the hype around UnRAID sprung from when Linus on LTT created the 7 gamer, 1CPU series. And while cool and easy to set up, my view is $60 for essentially what can best be described as just a fancy WebUI to a NAS that has easy to setup hypervisor capabilities is outrageous. But then again, I'm a minimalist at heart and barely prefer my Proxmox setup to running QEMU on plain Arch.
His main server crashed big time once and he nearly lost all of his video data. It was a Windows server of course. Obviously there is nobody with linux skills in his team, and people with linux skills cost money, probably a lot more than he is willing to spend.
Plus you have to assume that Linus is part of the people that believe the propaganda about how linux is not user friendly, fragmented, not secure, etc... spread by the "establishment of admins", admins that had an entire career in Windows, and are trashtalking anything else because they don't want to learn anything new and most certainly not give their power position away in enterprises and administrations. These older establishment-admins are the biggest problem for ITC-security the world has for the moment, they don't understand the technology, they've only been on brand-specific trainings, they've gone lazy through the years, and they're entrenched in the Microsoft-ideology.
Two weeks ago, one of those guys said at a local event that he'd been told to make himself obsolete, because the company wants to go open source because the combined software licenses cost them over two million EUR per annum, and they want to save that by using open source software that does things better. He can't even make himself obsolete, because he can't even do the migration... But he was one of the guys that always had some crap to preach about linux and open source software, and all hardware had to be of this or that brand, and the cables had to be this or that, etc... It seems to me that Linus is one of those guys that would completely fall under the influence of such people, and would probably adhere to a similar philosophy.
Kinda agree with you that there's no Linux admin on his team, but I think he's learnt a lot from that mistake.
His setup for it was a little strange.
He had Hardware 3 X Hardware Raid 5.
Then He striped those 3 arrays under windows in RAID 0.
This allowed him to lose 1 drive per array which I guess he thought was fine.
Unfortunately one of the Controllers broke which I don't think he was expecting.
He's upped his game since then.
I think you guys are correct in saying unRAID is better in terms of ease of use. Personally I have a FreeNAS box, but I guess if I wanted a NAS + Docker + VM's I may have gone the uNRAID route as that would have suited my use case more?
Maybe for some less experienced users unRAID is a good place to start?
Thanks for the heads up that FreeNAS is going to support VM's!
x2.
But I'm surprised with all the hate in this thread, I'd gladly be an "idiot" that built a marketing empire off of that perception and allow me to not only pay off my 30yr jumbo mortgage but level up to a better place all together, and not everyone is a techie but wants something that works out of the gate and has support. Thats not my use-case, but I get its out there just like I drive a small pickup but I don't trash the HD trucks and 40mpg econoboxes around me, thus the unRAID team probably makes a nice little bit of cheddar also has a less dire mortgage situation as myself hahaha.
so like Linus i don't have a Linux admin on my team... And i am on yusufs side:
The same Hardware run a xenserver before with 3-4 VMs but the Hardware pass trough, ups, direct Drive access for VMs, all that was not easy to setup! But it didn't cost me anything (and my VMs didn't crash because of avast running...=unraid Problem) Still Unraid works and performs pretty good! I think the kernel is also more up to date than a 6.5 xen setup right? And the Dockers are great and kvm and its implementation may get better.
But €/$60 ... are there other/better alternatives i don't know
Happy unRAID user here (switched from FreeNAS 8), what's all the fuss about?
It works great for my needs: storing movies, tv-shows, music, some backups and other replaceable random stuff.
My array consists of four 3TB drives and one 40GB SSD write cache. This setup easily saturates gigabit on both read and write speeds.
Upgrading storage space is super easy: just add a random spinner. There is no need to upgrade every single drive in the pool/array, you can mix and match drives how you want.
Another huge advantage of unRAID is data recovery. If more than one drive fails, you can still recover data from the remaining undamaged drives. RAIDZ1 and RAID5 arrays are unrecoverable at that point.
UnRAID isn't perfect. There is no protection against silent data corruption (the best you can do is a scheduled parity check), and no real support for snapshots. That's fine for home use, but I wouldn't deploy this in any kind of enterprise environment.
I haven't tried any of the virtualization stuff, Docker containers fit my needs just fine.
Disclaimer: not a storage expert.
The documentation for unRAID is a joke - it's either shit or non-existent.
At this exact moment is the 3rd time I am trying to get into setting up unRAID on my home media server. I tried twice before, but dropped it both times, because I was just got too frustrated with it not working as it should, and there being no good documentation. And going to forums to either search through endless pit of posts or posting questions myself for every little thing and waiting for someone to properly answer - that is not the way to do things. At least, not if you have any type of life besides spending all your waking hours in unRAID forums...
Seriously - for the kinda sophisticated and complicated peace of software it became, especially with version 6 an up - the wiki has just a couple of pages. All for the older versions, that the current. For current version there's only "how to upgrade" page. 
Even the main site and the information about the software on it - which is the very first thing anyone sees, when they come to check out unRAID - it is outdated by a couple of versions and is full of old info, which is wrong by now. Even the most important thing, the ONLY thing, on which depends the price you have to pay - it outdated on the main site. Seriously...
The main source of information is the forums, which is a mess. The info is half scattered around the endless posts, or worse - buried in the conversations on completely different topics. And then these "no context" snippets are linked to from FAQs and shit.
Oh and pinned FAQ threads have more than half of their links dead. 
The only reason I'm trying to persevere this time, is I already have bought the Pro version years ago (expensive shit). And I really really tried to convince myself I need to use FreeNAS, but after making a "comparison spreadsheet" between unRAID and FreeNAS - I once again decided, I simply can't afford to run FreeNAS at this time. Loosing 40% of usable space (8 disk RAID-Z2 vdevs, with maximum 80% usable space) is just too rich for me, for the moment. And of course - having to always deal in the packs of 8 drives...
So that's my little sad rant...
I understand your frustration and whole heartily agree, the documentation is complete shit. Honestly, this is the exact reason I never went the unRAID route. The only good documentation was from SpaceInvaderOne and even then it was a whole hassle to weed through it all. But then in my case, I wasn’t using unRAID for its main purpose as a NAS, but rather a hypervisor for gaming VM’s. I learned a lot, yes, but I ended up just installing Manjaro and configuring KVM+QEMU myself with PCIe pass-through. Luckily I never made it pass the testing phase and never brought a license. I’m a huge fan of Proxmox, as opposed to unRAID, but then my use cases were never within unRAID’s main goal.
3 year Necro