I recently decided to give Unraid a try.
What’s unRaid I hear you asking yourself? It’s a Linux based OS designed to make running file servers, Docker containers and VM’s easy.
I went with the pro version, which costs US$129 after trialling the product for 30 days.
The way that the RAID arrays are configured is quite different to hardware raid, you effectively can mix and match hard drives and designate 1 or 2 drives to maintain the parity data. The parity drives need to be the same or larger than the largest disk in the volume. Using this type of setup means you have more flexibility in terms of your hard drives.
I’m using a RAID card and enclosure in my system, and there are some things to watch out for – firstly you don’t really want to run the card in the traditional raid mode – you want to run the card in IT (HBA) mode. the card I had handy didn’t support that, so I’ve bought another one of ebay – however as a workaround you can use either JBOD or Single Raid 0 volumes – which is what I had to do, it’s pretty clunky but I’ll sort it out when the ebay card arrives.
The first thing you want to do is install the community apps plugin. Instructions are on the UnRaid site. This plugin makes it super easy to deploy ready-made containers. I’ve set up Plex and a few others and it works a treat. I’m very happy with the functionality.
I’m still exploring the features but it appears to do everything I need and I expect to replace my existing server setup with unRaid in the near future.
Try it out, it’s pretty cool https://unraid.net/