Disclaimer: I am by no mean a professional. I am just doing this for fun and enjoy learning along the way (I probably still don’t know anything 🤣). These are not meant as a guide and should not be treated as such. What I am showing you here is what I did, and it worked for me and my situation but might not apply to you. Your result could be very different from mine. Heck, I could be doing or saying something entirely wrong since I’m still considering myself a newbie (Hence the name of my site “noob to networking” 😉). Please don’t take a random person’s words on the internet too seriously, and again, ALWAYS and I mean always do your own research (Well, take this one seriously, though).

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! It’s been a couple of days since my last post (well, err.. my part of the posts). So here I am, on Christmas Eve, writing, and hopefully, I will be able to finish this topic. Of course, it will not be out on Christmas Day as much as I hoped for a Christmas Miracle. My slowness and laziness triumph over all that possibility, so you have to excuse me. With that said, I will be writing a little bit on Christmas Day, and throughout this weekend, so I will have it done on Monday as usual. Keeping things consistent is pretty hard, especially when you have an un-discipline like myself. Then why not be more discipline, you ask? Easy said than done. Everything is a work in progress, and it takes a lot of effort, but I’m trying my best to meet at least the quota I set for myself. If I fail that, then we do have a problem.

With that said, let continue the topic we talked about last week, shall we?

Why Unraid?

We have to go back to when I first determine what operating system I want to install on my NAS to answer this question. Three candidates were Unraid, TrueNAS (FreeNAS at the time), and Open Media Vault (OMV). Here is my thought process at the time, objectively I didn’t particularly appreciate how OMV looked, and at the time, it was not entirely on par in terms of popularity compared to the other two. I eliminated it first. That left me with Unraid and FreeNAS.

• FreeNAS: using ZFS files systems and it has a very nice Web Graphic User Interface (GUI) and the most important factors of all is that it is FREE!! Yes free, so there isn’t much of a downside to try it out. The downside (at least to me) is that it looked very intimated to new user such as myself. I had no idea what I am doing and reading(well skimming) some of the guide make my head spin. Also I need to have a few more hard drive to started as I read I need a certain amount of hard drive to start and it is too complicate for my smooth brain at the time to handle. Worse of all, Didn’t I mentioned how expensive hard drives are? Specially they charged premium for NAS drives. I was broke after built the system so that was one of the reason I decided against using FreeNAS for my Do It Yourself (DIY) NAS build. To be honest, this is kind of the last resort if all my other options did not come into fruition and I was never have to go there.
• Unraid: At first, I would not consider Unraid, well it was on the table but on the back of my head, I would be like “well I will probably going to ended up using FreeNAS anyways since I do not think I want to spend $60 on an Unraid License” If you can’t already tell, I am cheap. But I read the review for Unraid and found the review is pretty good, and the support is stellar on the Unraid forum. If I get stuck I can always look for help. Which is perfect for beginner. There are a couple features of Unraid that really fit my current situation (which I will explain in a bit). The only downside that have me reluctantly to go for it is that it is not free. If I have to pick between paying and not paying for something, guess what am I going to pick? Pretty sure I was not alone in this. Good thing Unraid offered a trial for 30 days with options for extra 2 15 days extension (so 60 days in total). If you aren’t considering purchasing after a week or 2 of using the operating system then you probably never will (from my personal experience of course). This is not a sponsor for Unraid, far from it 😂 since I paid them to be able to use their software and nothing else.

So, in the end, I decided maybe I would try Unraid first and see for myself what all the reviews are about. If anything, I can always use FreeNAS for the free solution. As you have already guessed, I really like the software, and it won me over only after a couple of days of use. I like how the user interface is clean and intuitive, how simple it is to add the drives, and able to utilize all the capacity without worrying about setting up a RAID configuration. I guess it lives up to its name, “Un-RAID” 😂. The setup was painless and straightforward. Also, the option to be able to add more drives in the future and no hard drives requirement that they need to be the same capacity or speed is a big deal for me. Since I was broke after building the system, I can at most afford 2 of the Ironwoft NAS drives that would not fly with FreeNAS since, at the time, you need to have at least 3 of the same drives for the configuration. While Unraid I can settle with what I have, if I happen to have a couple of spare old hard drives from a laptop lying around, I can use it and increase my storage capacity without any issues. All and all, it ticked all the boxes for my case:

• Easy to set up ✅
• Intuitive graphic user interface ✅
• Able to accommodate my future expansion when the funds and life allowed ✅
• No requirements what drives I can use and make thing easy to add new drives ✅
• Community support for beginner, I was able to find all my issues been asked before on the forum thus with easy google search I was able to find the solution ✅

Of course, Unraid isn’t without flaws and issues. For example, if you do not have SSD as a cache drive, the speed is slow, which could be a deal-breaker for some. There is a bit of a learning curve, which would be the same for anything news. It takes time to adapt. It was not as simple as the commercial solution, but I trust you will be able to get the hang of it in no time (if not, then well, there is the community support for 😉)

Of course, I am by no mean an Unraid expert. I am just an average user or even below average. I can’t tell how many times I have to look up to solve some problems with my system. Heck, sometimes I even have to use…the command lines 😱 Dun dun dun. Scary right? I understand everyone new to Linux and networking is terrified of command lines, and so do I. I’m not going to tell you that you might be wrong and the command line is superior or such, but it gets better once you get the hang of it. However, I avoid using the command line unless it is the last resort and there is no other way to do things.

I’m afraid that all the time we have for this part. I guess we will have to extend this to part 3 (Who would have thought, right? 🤣). I ran out of time for this week. In my defend, these are very hectic weeks, and most people (yes, including me) spend time with their families. I promised the next post would be long (though I doubt anyone would have a long attention span to read through) or at least more content. Until next time, have a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Year!🎊