Hey guys. I’ve been considering maybe moving to another OS for my home lab. Do you have have any suggestions? Especially former Unraid users? Mostly just for arrs though I would like to run reverse proxy/file hosting as well. Proxmox seems pretty trendy can I use it for arrs as well as backups?
Rant/extra info:
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I’ve been using Unraid for a couple years now, even paid for basic registration. I’ve largely used it to run all my arrs in docker, pihole and had a HASSIO VM running.
I recently tried setting up nextcloud, during the set up (which like nearly everything, I followed a video guide for) I ran into a novel error. So I deleted the nextcloud docker and got it from the official repo instead. Now my nextcloud share is gone and I can’t create new shares??
Stuff like this happened when I set up guac. Weird errors, plenty of which have little documentation or explanation. Plenty of which I need to ssh in or use Linux commands to fix. Which lead me to, “I’m having to learn this stuff anyway, why not spin up a Linux server and learn properly”.
Should I just rebuild/give Unraid a bit more time, it is young OS wise right?
For entry homelab stuff I still think it’s great. Literally just smacked it into an old HP server (now my cannibalised gaming builds) and it was good to go. However I was pretty inexperienced then (hence why I think I may have borked something fundamentally). Now days I’m more comfortable which getting under the hood hence looking for alternative. Definitely would still suggest Unraid to some though.
I was tempted to do something like an Ubuntu server. I figured all my NAS stuff is run through docker anyway. Cheers I’ll check out dockge
Yeah but as far as i know, unraid doesn’t really do anything that for example TrueNAS Scale can’t do? And TrueNAS is free and really rock-solid.
So if someone doesn’t want to host an Ubuntu Server i’d recommend checking out TrueNAS Scale and simply throwing some dockers at it
UnRAIDs parity is completely different than ZFS (TrueNAS) - and I’d argue unRAID is a better option for hosting a home media server. TrueNAS uses ZFS, so data on the drives is striped and they all need to be spun up together. UnRAID doesn’t stripe data, so only the relevant drive needs to be spun up (+parity if you’re writing). This also means if you lose parity +1 drive you only lose the data on that drive. Whereas with ZFS if you lose parity +1 you lose EVERYTHING in that array. It’s also way easier to expand your array in UnRAID, simply plug in any drive (as long as its smaller than parity) and it’ll just work. Expanding or adding vdevs in ZFS is not so simple and requires planning.
On top of all that, UnRAID can do ZFS too now (although I wouldn’t recommend it for the main array for the reasons stated above). So if anything the question should be “what can TrueNAS Scale do that UnRAID can’t do?”
I’d argue TrueNAS is better if you need top speeds and advanced features like bit-rot protection. But for a simple home media server where things like idle power-use and ease-of-use are more important I think unRAID wins hands down.