The Pros and Cons of UnRAID - Should You Use It?

[Music] hello and welcome back and that's right today I want to return to the subject of unride and in today's video I'm going to address something that after doing some serious Googling myself doesn't seem to have existed and that is a pros and cons list I want to give you five reasons why you should consider utilizing unrate as your file system server of choice and five reasons why you might want to remain on the fence and carry on with your true Nazis and your sonologies and your qnaps what do I mean by the way by there not being a pro and conscious of course that does exist in lots of places online but for the new entry use into the world of unread or someone that is kind of on the fence already utilizing other servers and file systems out there that are looking at unread there isn't much of a direct comparison between us as I see hopeful purpose of this video to compare five big standout things about it for the good and the bad so let's crack on with number one foreign is pretty resource friendly would be the understatement of the decade unride can run from something as simple as a USB drive it can even run from a high-speed uh SD card depending on the system you're going to utilize and that means that the majority of the system resources that you have can go towards that storage with the OS that unray that you set up on a normal windows or Linux based system plug it in set up your USB take it out and plug it into your brand new server the majority of the kind of brains of the outfit the instructions that are getting given are being delivered by this USB's parameters early doors what does that result in it results in a much more uncluttered approach to your Hardware resources there so whether it is you're going to be repurposing an old PC that's got the CPU the mobile and the uh you know the memory intact and you just want to kind of bastardize it and you know symbiotically utilize the existing Hardware with your new unride brain you can do that I talked about it on the channel that you can take advantage of Nas systems that are out there in order to just take over and not bother using their OS and just plug in this little USB and then suddenly all of that Hardware is up for grabs and uncluttered access to a lot of that bare metal architecture whether you're going to be utilizing for a number of different say Docker applications with Plex running on unrated surprisingly well given that the brains of the outfit that are delivering the instructions of the CPU technically is running off that USB with that lower resource consumption it also opens the door significantly to allowing you to kind of choose your server quite delicately in terms of power consumption over time within unread in Lim which is a way that you are limited to with a lot of TurnKey solutions that kind of force you down a certain road with the hardware consumption and the why you can configure that Hardware within your 24 7 server there are hurdles and barriers such as VM Direct passer into bare metal isn't quite extreme large as you might like but the majority of cases unrated particularly in container form allows you to really better harness the resources to a much more efficient output [Music] this next point is actually relatively new to Android's latest uh six version and that is support of ZFS pools natively there one of the inherent I think uh kind of barist a lot of um the last few years at least people to considering moving away from freenas as it used to be known or true Nas looking at unrated and a lot of that container support and ease and low Resource Management um was uh kind of a barrier for them was there was the lack of protection of 42 ZFS there was a lot of the bit rock protection just long-term consistency of the ZFS file system there and now it has been rolled in natively although it's available in a slightly modded form again I recommend you check out a couple of uh space invader one videos on that I'll try and link to a couple in the description um but now with Native support of ZFS in the latest iteration of um unraved 6 means that you are able to better harness those existing pools but also start building up towards those new ones [Music] at this point sort of piggybacks on my first one but slightly differently and that is you can really cut Corners with regards to the hardware at its lowest iteration and again you've got to factor in any kind of uh Dockers or any of that container stuff you're going to play with but unright can run on a single gigahertz core system recommended full gig of memory for the uh the main installation for to running all the surfaces of unread there but I reckon you can get away with 2gig and just generally any hardware supported system that can run a Linux OS there which when it comes to the majority of motherboards there is pretty much total you're laughing you can pretty much run it on very Baseline level Hardware if you've got an old laptop knocking around that you want to just plug in some drives with or just an old real ancient old PC system that may have been running on some Athlon AMD processor knocking around in a Cupboard you can probably turn that into an unrated server and you know given that SATA or sata 3 hasn't changed that much over time and again it can even start a two to a degree if you're going to talk about limitations of performance later on the hardware um kind of starting point for unright is extraordinarily low and once again that just factors more and more into that intelligent and efficient Hardware resource utilization that is a Mainstay backend of unride [Music] next up let's talk about unraved expandability and one of the slightly counter-intuitive things about the name unrated and that is it is not comparable Ray to what you are used to actually uses a very unique uh parity system across the drive that you utilize somewhere and again there is one major downside which I'm sure a number of you aware of that I'll definitely mention in the other half but when it comes to the drives that are within your unraid groups that you're going to be utilizing there most of the data that's being written to it goes right the way down to the bit level on a zero or a one and using a complicated calculation which can be simplified by the way down to a system of odds and evens it not only means that it can effectively scale up the number of drives within your Android groups exponentially but on top of that it allows you to start introducing larger drives later on rather than be restricted the way traditional raid does for all of the drives inside the groups to be the same capacity there again it's a very unusual methodology that goes into how it does the checks across each individual bit all the way down and I'm talking straight to the smallest bit on an odd even calculation but still nonetheless that does mean a tremendous flexibility in terms of the drive utilization down the line and the chip the shear scalability I'm afforded to you for small modest home now users [Music] another oft overlooked thing is of course the app center there and again I sign up Center is effectively a container store there with 1 750 odd containers at the time of recording there and pretty much everything is covered there if you are looking for something to smartly manage a a home system there you can get it there if you want to uh create a synchronized system with say cloud services out there it's in there and of course things like Plex Media Server and other multimedia platforms are rolled in as well because there is a huge boom of these kind of custom made multimedia centers arriving in container form there on top of that from within side there you can dig down pretty darn deep into custom servers running within unread if you are someone that does a lot of PC gaming and you've looked at the cost of private servers chances are you'll be able to find a private server container creation within that app center of unraid that you can deploy fantastically quickly and as long as you've got a half decent bandwidth boom you can run your Daisy server from there and it isn't just Minecraft there is a huge number of different supported Game servers for PC and with regards to some games out there console based service that you can point at a 42 years if you wanted to run your own gaming server take the time to go through that app center and chances are you'll find some very popular PC and again console games with connected PC servers available too to run your own game servers with your own rules and setup is very Niche utilization but I know there are people out there that utilize unray for affordable game servers there but unrate above and beyond its utilization for storage and you know embracing things like ZFS um or at least natively as an optional visible point isn't always going to be enough and alongside those five great things there are five reasons why unraid may not beat for you I was always going to raise this point wasn't I it was going to be performance unfortunately unraid does not come anywhere close to TurnKey and even osdiy Nazis uh in the likes of true Nas versus Synology and qnap and the like in terms of performance because the drives themselves are not being accessed simultaneously the way they are in a normal now system there so unlike the benefits of say a raid um five or Raid six or a narrator where multiple drives or cluster rate I should say that are being read and written to simultaneously it doesn't work like that in unread and effectively you are writing to one drive with a cloning mechanic at any given time regardless of the number of drives you're using it is very linear in its writing operation across the disks that you span and consequently even if you take advantage of things like intelligent SSD caching which can provide improvements again you're only really getting very limited improvements when you look at them number of drugs you are utilizing in your spend compared with that other traditional rate supported Nas Linux system and of course the true Nas One there as well so bear that in mind if you're looking at unrate if you are going to be using performance prohibitive applications and where your storage may serve as a bottleneck regardless of your CPU GPU memory setup this next point I don't think it's anywhere near the attention it shouldn't and that is that on ride is not that user friendly now I've got to stay relative because it is user friendly in a way the options are presented very clearly the configuration exactly where it's expected to be and the unrated UI in its last few major version upgrades has really seen Improvement in how the information is presented to you particularly when you're talking about a software platform that is so DIY it's unreal that no one person set up is going to be the same as any other unlike Nas Brands where they have a very limited Hardware spec to work within and therefore they can be quite tailored in that fashion nonetheless despite unrated improving things drastically in the GUI that you can access there via the network or remotely using their my server mechanic it's still going to be quite an upheaval for a lot of users that are coming off the back of traditional Nas systems like these with that chewable friendly kind of Windows Android EOS with unraved the way things are configured in some of the new terminology that gets rolled in although it's a lot of one page Splash configuration unless you're coming off the back of right rather customized Nas service to start with you are going to find unraid something of an uphill battle in terms of that learning curve so do bear that in mind now this is one of those points that may become out of date but I'm not sure it will and again this information at least as far as I checked three or four months ago seems to be seemingly the same and that is you can't really run unride on an arm-based process it is processor it is very very x86 Centric now whether that is unrelated whether that is because of the compression that is required with the instruction to the CPU within an arm-based processor V7 V8 color where you like even if it's 64-bit it's still going to be a hurdle um seemingly unright still does not uh he's not supported on these platforms now one of the things that's real disappointment about that is not only that some people have been able to run it um on uh Raspberry Pi Vira can you know convoluted container system there which again isn't ideal because running on ride as a VM within another not great um but on top of that it is the idea that because of its sheer efficiency in utilization and the fact you can run don't touch low spec and that unright doesn't really have the performance benchmarks of a lot of the larger Nas systems it's just a real shame that unraved which once again doesn't need a GUI via an HDMI output by the way it can be wholly configured and accessed via the network even the first time access requires the USB being configured off system first it's a real shame that you can't plug it directly and run unride from an arm-based system that may or may not have a a graphical user interface output there and of course the fact that the limitations of storage and unride being this light for in the OS and things like raspberry piers and arm-based systems you can get them to be fantastically small and portable it's just a real shame that unrate still at least as far as my knowledge in the time of recording is not arm supported talking of another unraved limitation which seems to be part of the original design of unraid which is they're not prepared to change but maybe at the time of recording or even the time between recording and publication in this video may have changed that is the root access um is the only one that can access that main GUI flow control of the system is limited to One account that you can't delegate superpowers there within the system and all of that power can only be restricted to the room now yes from a security aspect and indeed the architecture of this being designed away is it makes a great deal of sense but still nonetheless the the lack of being able to create a secondary access to a lot of that control and limiting it just to that one person account has caused friction sometimes although it's understandable it's still not ideal for a lot of user class setups they're beyond the home level although unraid is still in a lot of community circles still not considered Enterprise you know pure worthy and still homeless app plus it's just a real shame that it's still limited to this one door entry point into Superuser now I'm putting this one on at the end but I'm not really that bothered about it but I know it bothers some people and that is unraid isn't free if you do want to take advantage of unride and install unrate on your little USB although you're gonna have to buy your server buy your case reuse some old Hardware you've got knocking around maybe you're going to use an old now as an old PC or whatever the actual unraid software requires a bit of the old buns now when you set it up for the first time you do get a 30-day trial so you can download it set up your USB test it for 30 days if it's not floating your boat you can junk it but after that 30-day point you've got one of three options you can spend 59 and I can support up to six storage interfaces if you go for the 89 tier you get up to 12 interfaces there or if you go up to 129 you get unlimited there within the hardware spec now the reason I'm not wholly behind calling this a negative Point although I will include it in the five bad point for some users is that software's got to be supported and if you want software to develop either it has a much more passive means or of donation by users which you know let's call it what it is advertising Revenue we know as well as anyone here on YouTube or you have to go for a paid model there and they've gone to the trouble of including 30 days of testing which is pretty darn good to be frank but still nonetheless don't think unride is completely free it's semi-open Source at best but it ain't open source in the whole you haven't got to pay the old bunts up front there but that's really it this is five reasons why you might want to go ahead and try out or go ahead and fully install on raid on your system and five reasons why you might want to sit on the fence a little bit longer and carry on doing what you're doing we will have a follow-up to this video coming soon where we're going to dig a little bit deeper into this and talk about some of the operational values of unread compared with things like true nice and some of the other Nas Brands out there so I recommend you check that out but apart from that thank you so much watching if you've enjoyed this let me know in the comments if there's any Plus or negative you think I've missed or errors throughout this video let me know in the comments use the free advice section over and as Compares and the free community foreign of course to talk to us on there but apart from that thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 36,005

Keywords: Best NAS Container App, Best NAS Hypervisor, How to Install UnRAID on NAS, NAS 2023, NAS Hypervisor, UnRAID, UnRAID 2023, UnRAID Container, UnRAID Containers, UnRAID Guide, UnRAID NAS, UnRAID NAS Guide, UnRAID NAS Installation, UnRAID on NAS, UnRAID VE, UnRAID vm, UnRAID vs Virtualbox, UnRAID vs QTS, UnRAID vs TrueNAS, UnRAID vs VMware, Unraid vs Proxmox, Unraid vs Synology, Unraid Pros and Cons, Unraid Advantages, Unraid Disadvantages, Unraid vs QNAP, Unraid vs VMWARE

Id: GIpf4DmJgcA

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023