Checking out Unraid For the First Time!

hey guys what's going on it's Don here from Nova Spirit Tech and welcome back to the channel and today we're going to be checking out unraid so let's get [Music] started so this is my first impression of unraid I actually never used it before and I got to say it's really good now what first started as operating system for nases like free Nas or true Nas now it developed itself into something completely different with a lot of Community Support guides and a ton of things that you can add on to this through their App Store it makes this so impressive what I like about this the most is how intuitive it is I actually did not have to Google much to figure out how to operate this operating system unlike xcp and G which I did a video on earlier so all in all I am very liking this system especially how the UI is now now I never really checked out this operating system until recently and that is due to the fact how I don't like the boot media I always wanted to check it out but I wish it was like an ISO so I could just boot it into a VM and test it out but no this requires a USB stick and when you do register the product or you purchase the product it will be locked to that USB stick so you got to make sure you don't lose it in my case I just have it installed in a USB stick I don't plan to keep it on I do want to purchase another one of these sandis and stick it on here and use it forever this is definitely a testing environment before I switch it over to something better now let's jump over to the desktop now the first thing you see here is the unraid dashboard I did do a little tweaking with this and I added the Dracula theme which is something I thought it would be easier to do but it isn't but it wasn't all out hard it was just a matter of installing their plugins now this isn't a video about how to set this up you do have to uh set up your array and set up your disc and everything but this is more just like showing you guys what I have found out through first impression now I do like how everything is laid out on the dashboard and you could see uh what operating system you're using what kind of CPU what motherboard everything that you need to know and you could tell that I am actually using the zma blade which has the j3455 at 1.5 GHz now this is not an impressive CPU least to say UNR could farewell with a lot better setup but for now this is what I'm using for testing now I do have two hard drives installed onto here uh which is dis one and disc 2 which they're 2 terabyt each giving me a total of 4 terabytes and if you are using unraid on 6.12 and on you do have the option to install ZFS which is something I do plan to play with but for now like I said this is just a demo this is just a test until I get really familiar with it so if you guys know of any like plugins which is a must have to install onto this let me know down in the comments below because I want to check those out because I know there definitely is a lot of plugins that you must have on this at first glance um over here just tells me what I have going on but you can't really do much in the dashboard you do have to use these tab menus which is what I noticed now you do have to set up your shares and I did have a little bit of an issue setting up my shares when I first played around with it I didn't know that you actually had to enable this as export I was like why can't I get my shares working I can't see anything it's it's because of this little export as soon as you hit yes on this uh your shares just show up another thing that I noticed is that when you go in there's no way of really setting permissions so when I first installed a Docker it created these folders for me which I wasn't able to transfer anything into because of permission issues and I thought I had to like navigate around here so I could set permissions but there's really nothing you can do here to set the permissions what you have to do is actually go into tools and then go to new permissions and then fix it through here I actually rewrite all the permissions of the folders so you are able to write onto them again so be sure to have either the folder already made or be able to use this new permission uh program right over here other than that those were the only problems I've noticed Now setting up my theme all I had to do was head over to settings and uh install theme engine which you can find in the App Store and once you have theme engine installed you can go in here and modify the stuff that you need and then get it over to the theme that you want for me I'm using the Dracula theme from uh theme parks which is another website I think I could show you theme parks which is this website right over here it'll actually show you how to get unraid set up uh with the theme engine and how to get it up and then there's Community themes or themes that you can actually just choose and like I said I like the dracul theme so I actually just chose this and you can actually add this on to multiple things not just unraid like if you got radar sonar or even Plex you could actually add the drag Li theme using their methods which is really cool I never knew about that now moving on after you get theme engine set up this is how unraid looks on the dashboard which is a purplish and whitish dark theme which is by far one of my favorite theme settings now moving past the settings there's a bunch of things you could do over here so you're going to have to play around with it I do like that they integrated UPS settings in here so if you do have this attached to a UPS you can manage it through this website um plugins is also another thing that if you install plugins like the theme engine it'll be here that you configure and you can install uh plugins manually if you have it somewhere in your system now Dockers is another thing that I was playing around with which I thought was pretty interesting it does show you like similar to what you would have in portainer uh your ports that you're expanding the volume mappings that you have do you want to auto start it or not but you can actually still click on here and go into other test like I if I wanted to go into console it'll pop it up and I could just you know browse right through the console or if I needed to go into here and edit my settings I could go in here and add more volumes what I had to enable was dev.d just to enable uh transcoding through my GPU but that was very easy to add into and what I do like is that I didn't have to guess anything I could just go in here and select what I needed and eventually it'll pop up with Dev ddri so a lot of this stuff is actually very easy to manage compared to trz where nothing was laid out and you have to manually guess everything moving on to VMS I didn't have anything VM installed yet because this only has 8 gigs of RAM so I didn't want to bottleneck it with installing a VM while doing this demo but adding a VM seemed to be very easy you just go to ad VM click whatever you want say like if I wanted uh diban where is this diban right here it'll actually load everything up here and then you could just continue finishing up your settings and get this all started so it was pretty easy and pretty straightforward so I didn't have to Google much to figure out what I needed to do so I really like the fact that everything's just laid out if I need three CPUs two CPUs and nose I can't put 16 I don't have a 16 core CPU in this now moving on to apps where which is their bread and butter they have so many apps on this now most of which is Docker so you can actually do a Docker install without having to use unraid but they have everything all incorporated into here and if it's official like this one it will actually have official stamp on the top top right knowing that it's actually approved by unraid to install onto unraid to work so it's really cool how they have so many apps here and you could go in and dig up whatever you want now if I go into plugins these logos change you see how this little icon becomes like a puzzle block that means it's a plugin and it goes into the plugin section it integrates somewhat with unraid instead of having to run a Docker on top of and I do know that there is a lot of something called the CA and then whatever plugin it is and I do want to discover more of that which is community applications I think or Community something and it integrates well with in the unraid uh ecosystem and it helps you manage your ecosystem a little bit better so I am going to start digging up these uh CA programs to see what I could do with them but yeah there is a lot if I go into media servers and I'm looking for some sort of like Plex or um jelly fin or something like that you'll be able to find something in here that is worth it for your system now if you can't find something in here that you need you can always go to Docker and add your own container through here and manually type out what you need you know the repository that you need what it does what port you need to open so you can actually just manually install Docker and if you want you can actually install painer in here and then add the pie hosted templates and add more Docker support if you need to through that so it's really impressive on how easy it is to navigate around how intuitive it it is for me to understand how to manage everything so overall I really like the system and I see why a lot of home labers use unraid versus the free options that are available it's just so much easier to navigate and then here we have tools which I showed you a little bit about the new permissions and then you have system devices or system drivers and if I plan to install a graphic card onto the zma blade I could actually pop it into here and look at the system devices and install the drivers and stuff now as far as the pricing plan goes it's actually very reasonable now I am on the free trial right now just to test out the Opera system so I have like unlimited Pro I can add as many hard drives as I want but they are limited to what the pricing plan is to how many attached storage devices so if you are installing this on like a qap or a taster or just a PC mind how many attached storages you're going to be using then that's the price that you're going to be paying now you can upgrade from this to this without having to pay the full price you can just upgrade it and pay the difference they do have some sort of like upgrade plan over here and it'll tell you like oh if you want to upgrade from basic to plus it'll be $39 so you're not paying the full full price at all and really depending on your setup $59 with six attached storage which is most of the time that I'm going to be using like maybe four storages or five um $59 is actually a pretty good price and if you want unlimited then you just go for the9 and this is all lifetime it's not like a monthly fee so I get the idea I also love the fact that uh anytime I Google something for unraid their forums come up up with a lot of answers that I need like originally when I was playing around with the docker on um jelly fin on how to get the GPU it was right there in front of you you just had to pass that graphic card over and then they'll be able to run it so be sure to check out their Community forums that they have on their website they do have a lot of stuff mentioning what you need done and I found a lot of this stuff also unread so they they have a unraid redit section where you can actually just look up a lot of the information that you need but mostly I want to be able to get this system up to what my proxmox was doing a couple of weeks ago where I get uh jelly fin uh sonar radar and all this other stuff and I want to see how easy it is to get everything all tuned up but I do want to switch over to a ZFS raid system so I can play around with that as well but for now if you guys are new to home lab I highly recommend using this operating system because it just makes sense it just works so if you guys have any mus have applications that you got to add to this like plugins or apps let me know down in the comments below because I want to check them out as I'm learning this operating system and if you guys are new to this channel consider subscribing and also hitting that Bell notification icon so you know when the next video is going to be out and I sa my ner cave hack to it hearts

Channel: Novaspirit Tech

Views: 15,550

Keywords: novaspirit, tech, unraid, homelab, unraid server, nas, unraid nas, unraid setup, review, first impressions, checking out unraid, 6.12.6, home server, linux server

Id: Son7F5Vv1p4

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024