It’s proprietary, after all. I understand paid is fine, but even then, it usually better be open source.
So, why is Unraid an exception ?
Thanks
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Proprietary doesn’t necessarily have to be bad, obviously this will vary from person to person and who you ask. Personally Ive listened to enough podcasts with Unraid folks in them and read articles etc to be able base my trust in them and what they do.
Except you kinda get crucified for not using (F)OSS on lemmy^(exceptions apply)
Exceptions I encountered:
- Apple (to some degree)
- Plex
- Unraid
Since you mentioned Plex, HAVE YOU HEARD OF JELLYFIN?
/s
Yep.
And they released today the new version 10.11.0 with massive improvements (according to the changelog/blog) to the server.Make sure to try it ;)
They had the right product at the right time. No other free or paid alternative was that user friendly in allowing laymen in mixing and matching multiple disks and having redundancy
Doing that with pure Linux command line at the time it was inconceivable for 99% of users (at most a raid1 with mdadm over two drives could be easily attained) and windows home server initially was an alternative but Microsoft was completely misguided and “improvements” in Windows home server 2 completely killed it
Then they added docker support and it was even easier to self host everything.
But if they tried to launch today, with how mature are free alternatives, they would never reach critical mass adoption to be sustainable.
For example, I don’t think that the paid fork of truenas that LTT has economically backed is going to be successful
For example, I don’t think that the paid fork of truenas that LTT has economically backed is going to be successful
Maybe not in the short term.
But he mentions them on every ocassion they’d use TrueNAS that doesnt require advanced configuration.And it really is just a pretty frontend with some additional features.
So I don’t see why it can’t be successful (except for too high prices)As an user that paid for windows home server, why windows home server 2(011) was a complete failure
- Updating to whs2 required a full wipe - unacceptable by everyone
- Updating to whs2 required to pay full price and not upgrade price - lol
- The system drive wasn’t covered by redundancy and you would lose all the settings if the drive died
- The data drives also couldn’t get any kind of redundancy as they REMOVED the feature from the server and moved it to clients! What the fuck? It was the main selling point! Easy raid for everyone. What’s the purpose of the “home server” if it couldn’t pool drives, while the clients with Windows 8 home instead could set a massive, redundant, pool of 10 drives???
- They removed the useful feature that backed up automatically all the windows computers in the network
- They removed the basic features like the media gallery and such, to see that you would need windows media center… but 6 years after they killed windows media center
Off-topic, but if you want a competent Unraid alternative, then try Proxmox.
Arent they different solutions that also offer overlapping features (e.g. VMs and Containerization).
I would rather compare Proxmox with Hyper-V than Unraid.
It’s less hassle than maintaining my homelab was when I used Ubuntu server. Just because I can do it the “hard way”, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy easy mode and not having to do much of anything.
They give you exactly what they promise with zero enshitification. It’s a solid product and was worth it to me to buy, just for the convenience.
I get that. But at the same time, when shit does go wrong, it’s so much harder to work around their whole system when it’s so unfamiliar. I’m not speaking from experience with unraid. Just other NAS solutions (TrueNAS) and other “easy mode” options from other tech. I almost always end up tossing it out for the less hand-holing option. Because then I have to understand it, and if I understand it, it becomes so much easier.
I’ve never once had anything go wrong with Unraid. But even if I did, it’s pretty painless to restore a backup since the OS is on a USB drive and isn’t very big.
I’ve never heard of it, but because it’s proprietary I assume useful idiots who don’t know any better use it just to fit in with each other.
I see it a lot these days.
You’ve mistakenly conflated the Self Hosted community with the FOSS community. There is a lot of overlap in interests between the two, but the venn diagram of those communities are not at all a circle. UnRAID isn’t an exception to self hosting, it’s a textbook example of selfhosting.
It’s a similar thing with the SH community and HomeLabbing. All home labs are selfhosted obviously, but home labs are sandboxes for learning, testing and prototyping. A raspberry pi that runs one service your home depends on that you don’t tinker with outside of updates isn’t a home lab.
This was my mistake when I started self hosting a few years ago!
I went all-in on FOSS. And my God, it was constantly a maintenance nightmare for some apps. Some would break with updates. Some times I felt I was playing wackamole replacing one set of problems with new ones.
Then I met a swlf-hoster who has been doing self hosting for two decades and he helped he unfuck my stuff by recommending commercial and paid services. And honestly, it was awesome because I’m too old for this shit. I just want working services.
I picked unRAID to be able to mix disk sizes. It also requires little maintenance in my experience, so that’s also a plus.
The big thing is very easily mix and match different sizes of disks. ZFS as of recently can sort of do that, but its not as efficient.
Mergerfs can do that too and you can keep the underlying fs as whatever you want.
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Can 100% do this. Not just kinda. Works fine.
Can it access a file without spinning up all disks in the array?
I haven’t used ZFS in like a decade, but would strongly consider going back to it if it can do that now.
If I’ve learned anything in the 30 odd years homelabing and running a SaaS application, it’s that you need to learn the basics of the command line. That will help you master running anything on a nix server.
But must new homelabers are only able to use a gui, so unraid is the best way to get into running stuff with the least effort.
I keep thinking a homelab 101 course would help those new to homelabing get going without a gui.
Oh hi I picked up Linux for the CLI and shell and the UI for me has nothing to do with it.
There is no easy way to break into the scene and unraid is a one stop shop. So you want to set up a few little projects on your own? It’s learning containerization, learning networking and NAT, figuring out filesystems (and shares and share locations) and backup strategies, how to integrate with VPN, deployment strategies and templates (think Ansible, docker compose, make scripts, etc). There’s a shitload to know and not a “for dummies” place to learn it.
Considering the “easy” first project of ARR suite + jackett, integrate with transmission, and integrate with jellyfin or Plex: this is not a couple hours of work if you’ve never done it before. With unraid it’s probably one video tutorial and less than an hour? Idk I haven’t done that one yet. But it’s a common request.
There are a lot of things that need to hang together for a good homelab to work, and unraid for me has made it so I don’t have to spend all my time doing plumbing and background work to try a project and see if I even want to use it.
I would absolutely do a 101 on self hosting, but it seems everybody has different priorities on what to host and how so it’s probably not cut and dry to implement.
The course would be more of a ‘how do you use the terminal and where to find help’
As a lot of the requests I see are the result of not having good experience on the command line, once you can use a terminal the world is yours to command
Because it’s easy and does all the hard stuff out of the box? Also any sized drives!
Has a nice UI, let’s me mix and match disks, let’s me host docker containers plus a VM with gpu pass through.
All basically out of the box. (Ok - Pass through was a bastard) All for a one off price.
I don’t know if there are other options that let me do all of that, unraid has always been the one mentioned.
Mixing disks is the #1 reason I went with unraid over any other option.
Zfs and truenas core do this fine
To note, unless you buy the most expensive tier it’s no longer a one time purchase.
It’s still a one time purchase for the license. It’s only OS updates that would need to be paid for yearly after the 1st year
Good point. I got 1 year of ultimate, with the plan to upgrade to perpetual if it was good (it is!).
The cost of that is still less than the cost would have been to buy new matching drives.
Yep they changed this somewhat recently I believe? Like a year or two back, not sure - before my time.
Last I checked I think it’s now like $50 or $60 for the first year, and renewals are half that, so definitely not terrible.
Yeah in the past year or so. I grandfathered in before they raised the price of that highest tier so I like to be sure people are aware. I’m a big fan and I think it’s worth the price.
Pass through is always a bastard.
I’ve always found it helpful to use the time stone and tell “IOMMU I’ve come to bargain” until it works.
It just needed the AMD compatibility plugin, lots of time wasted until someone pointed that out though.
They have (had?) a fairly generous free tier that works well for people starting out.
I ended up buying a license after evaluation because the UI provides everything I reasonably want to do, it’s fundamentally a Linux server so I can change things I need, and it requires virtually zero fucking around to get started and keep running.
I guess the short answer is: it ticks a lot of boxes.
Even in the open source community, the libre-ness of a product is just one of many factors. The fitness for a purpose, the initial difficulty of the setup, the continuous difficulty of operation and maintenance, the pace of development (if applicable), the professional or community support structure, the projected longevity of the product or service, and the general insanity of the people involved are all important factors that can, and often do outweigh the importance of open software.
Unraid is easy to start with when you have no idea what you’re doing. Other stuff often requires more up front work to setup.
The paid licence is just the cost of the conveniences.
UnRAID is also great when you know exactly what you’re doing but you do this stuff for work every day and your home stuff you want to be easy and out of the box lol.
Same, I’m a Linux user since redhat 5 and more than capable of running all the unraid features on a regular Linux distro or proxmox, truenas, whatever … I just don’t want to, I want flexible disk sizes and a bunch of docker containers, that’s it. Unraid offers that in a great package.
My only regret is that I have only one upvote to give this post.
Just because I have the skills to setup a cluster of mini-pcs doesn’t mean I want to spend my one-precious-fucking-spare-hour a day making the thing work.
See also: a builder’s house, a mechanic’s car etc
Is it much easier than TrueNAS?
I went with TrueNAS because it’s open-source, and it’s been smooth sailing.
(I just use it as a NAS, nothing more)
I’ve tried both Unraid and TrueNAS. While I greatly prefer TrueNAS, Unraid is much easier to set up and get going for beginners. It’s been a while since I’ve set up TrueNAS from scratch, but last I tried, it wasn’t a very beginner friendly experience. If you weren’t already familiar with ZFS, you were in for a pretty difficult time.
Couldn’t say, for me it was way way easier than ESXI which was my first break into the space. And also more complete / straightforward than bare metal which was what I had been doing before unraid.
I paid for the lifetime license. No regrets.
For me, it was the parity system and the fact that i could mix different disk sizes and the vm + graphic card pass-through setup. Unraid helped me to start in this world.
Years later, after gaining experience on all of that and investing in dedicated pcie card and disks, I’ve moved to truenas my data and containers.
Still using unraid for the vm part. But i plan to migrate to truenas too at some point.
