Turn an old PC into a powerful NAS solution using UNRAID!

okay guys welcome back to another episode of the bear tech today we're going to be reclaiming this old desktop computer and turning into a powerful network attached storage solution for your home or small business let's get into it [Music] so if you guys love technology and love getting the latest and greatest you probably found out that your desktop computer maybe you've got an i7 7 700k maybe your machine's only four years old and with the recent release of windows 11 you have found out that that's now not an option for you because of the new tpm2 requirements and the processor limitations that microsoft has stuck on the recent release of windows 11. the issue that you may find yourself in is that you're now looking to upgrade your desktop machine and you're going to have a spare computer laying around well the cool thing is is that with a piece of software called unraid we can turn a consumer grade desktop computer or equally you know server components as well we can turn it into a powerful fault tolerant network attached storage device that is up there with the likes of synology then unraid is a fantastic piece of software and we can utilize several hard drives to build a parity protected fault tolerant storage solution so personally i already use unraid unraid is a fantastic piece of software that is relatively cheap and you can purchase licenses in three different configurations you can go for the basic license which allows you to have up to six storage devices up to pro and unlimited personally i use the basic version i personally have three spinning standard hard drives in my main nas and i have a couple of ssds for caching and hosting docker containers and virtual machines today we're going to be reclaiming this i5 desktop machine that i have and we're going to be installing some additional hard drives as well as a cache drive and we're going to see what it takes to build a really awesome alternative to going out and buying a synology network attached storage device so you may have previously looked at devices like synology and qnap why wouldn't you go and purchase one of those devices from amazon or ebay or or from some other retailer whether that's online or on the street so to be honest with these kind of devices i personally don't like the fact that you've got a vendor lock-in so for example if your synology nas dies and they need to replace the motherboard inside that synology system or the qnap system that device has got to be either shipped off to synology where they'll then provide a replacement part but once that's out of warranty you've then got to source a specific motherboard for that device whereas with unraid it's running linux so you can pretty much use any motherboard configuration um bang a whole load of hardware together it's really good for cardboard compatibility the other really great thing that i love about unraid is the ability with its parity-protected array and and hence the name unraid you we we can grow our storage array over time we can add disks at any point in time we don't have to rebuild the array from scratch whereas other offerings such as troonas or freenas as it was previously known the problem is is that whilst you can create a raid5 array all of the disks have to be the same size and also you can't just add storage devices of random sizes whereas unraid allows you to as long as your parity drives are larger or equal to the largest drive in your in your drive pool then you can easily just add more storage over time so what i will be doing is i have three spare hard drives that i have laid out here i have a seagate three terabyte desktop grade hard drive i have a four terabyte western digital red pro drive and a six terabyte western digital black drive so you can also mix and match disk speeds for example all of these are 7200 rpm however it doesn't matter you can use a 54 5200 speeds discs it really doesn't matter at all so what else do we need well unraid boots and is installed onto a usb flash device so here i have a sandisk cruiser blade device it's 64 gigabytes of storage and works great for unraid we log on to a computer and we'll install the software to the usb stick this entire process is extremely simple and easy to do and i'll walk you through every step of this process of getting unraid set up let's jump into it right okay guys so now i'm on the computer and what we're going to do is without plugging our usb stick in just yet we're going to head on over to unraid.net so open the browser head over to unraid.net and press enter and then you should be greeted with the home page as shown here next we need to do is click on the download button up here in the top right of the screen so clicking on that should bring us to the downloads page so to install unraid we actually install it onto a usb thumb drive or a usb flash media device and to do that we're going to use the unraid usb creator software so over here as you can see we have the ability to download for mac or download for windows as i'm on a windows machine i'm going to use this bottom link here in theory if you're on a mac it should already be highlighted with this white box that surrounds this download for windows but anyway we're going to click on that now and um we should have a download appearing shortly there we go so i'm just going to head over to my downloads folder and we can now close the browser and we can just double click um the icon like so so by default the the options available to us should appear as follows so the version that appears should be stable we've got a couple of other options but stable is the version that we want so we're going to select that next up we've got the version of unraid that we're actually going to be downloading and installing to the usb stick by default this will be the latest version which is at the time of recording at least on raid 6.9.2 so we can leave that as well however there are other versions if you need something specific however i would personally recommend you leave it at unraised 6.9.2 next up we've got a customize button now you don't necessarily have to click on this and use these features however um i personally like to because we can customize the the server's name and we can also assign a static ip address to our server when it first boots so you won't have to go and hunt around for whatever ip addresses being given to your run rate server from your router or if you're running a separate dhcp server on your network so i'm going to leave the server name as tao for now that's fine we'll change that shortly um once we're actually inside the web control panel of unraid however i am going to select static guide pdf so i'm going to just enter an ip address on my network that i know is free just as i said just so we don't have to go hunting around for the dhcp allocated address later so i'm going to type in here 172 25 87 172 25 press tab to move across to the next section 80 87 and then i'm going to use um 28 and then i'm just going to set my gateway so this is the this will be the ip address of your router most probably unless you've got a special network setup or an advanced network setup should i say and dns server is again most likely to be your gateway ip address okay we can leave netmask as is for you guys you're probably using a more conventional ipsubnet for your home or office network so personally if you're not really sure as to what you're doing here i would leave it on dhcp and you can um find that shortly however if you do have an ip subnet that you have set up in your network and you know of an ip address that's free i'd certainly recommend you setting it in this section now it just saves you know configuration changes later so anyway now we're now we've completed that part i'm now going to insert the usb stick into the machine as you can see at the moment we've actually got nothing in this drop down box which is where we need to select that usb stick in a second so i'm going to plug it in now and we should then have the option to write the media to that flash drive okay depending on what you've currently got on your usb drive it may pop up here i'm just going to close this now and um as you can see the the actual application itself has automatically updated this drop down menu and has detected my sandisk cruiser blade usb stick if it doesn't however for whatever reason use this refresh button here and that should recheck your system for any plugged in compatible usb devices one thing to note however not all usb uh thumb drives or usb flash media devices are supported by unraid um on the unread website shown here under the prerequisites and on the wiki.unraid.net there are some prerequisites um usb manufacturers such as pny lexar sandisk samsung are recommended and but they do not however support usb 3.1 drives so obviously pay special attention here um i personally recommend getting a sandisk cruiser blade i know that works i use them on both of my unraid servers and they they work a treat also pay attention to the fact that the usb flash device needs to be two gigabytes or larger personally i'm using a 64 gigabyte flash device but yeah i've gone for the sandisk cruiser blade 64 gig version so now we're back at the usb flash creator simply click on the right button as shown here and then obviously we need to just pay attention and be 100 sure we've selected the right the correct device um so before hitting erase and write just make sure that what you're seeing here does match what you've plugged into your machine and it's certainly safer if you have multiple usb flash devices plugged into your machine to maybe remove those versatile just to ensure that you're that you don't make a mistake but anyway once you're happy hit click on the erase and write button here so this is now going to take a few seconds as you can see once this bar gets across we should be good to go okay you may have this window pop up you can simply close this and just wait for this process to complete right okay so the process is now done so we can now click close on this on this window and we can go down and eject our media okay so now the usb stick has been fully created we can now use this to plug into our unraid server and boot the operating system from this usb drive right okay guys this is the computer we're going to be using as you can see this is in a corsair case um it's an i5 so i'm just going to remove the um the thumb screws from the side here and just take off this cover always dusty if you're reclaiming an old machine probably is going to be dusty um you know ideally you know get a hoover in there first be careful not to touch any of the components but clear up you know um obviously you're now going to breathe a whole load of new life into this computer or into your machine should i say so you know it's best to clean it up you know give the fans a bit of a clean you know get the hoover in like i say just be careful with the components you're touching with any sort of metal hoover hose or hose pipe etcetera but what i'm going to do is i don't intend to run plex on this server i've already got it running on my main server this particular server is going to be a backup machine that i'll be using to store backups in so therefore i'm going to take out this graphics card here this old nvidia asus graphics card just just so really we're not we're not consuming power and we we're actually allowing more power from our main power supply to power our additional hard drives that we'll be installing today so first of all let's uh let's disconnect the power supply so i'm just going to take out the screws that hold this uh this graphics card in place and if you've got one of these large graphics cards there'll be a little retaining clip which you'll just need to push down behind it to uh to eject that out of the slot so push down and just ease the graphics card out like so okay so now as you can see it's pretty bare and it's now exposed our sata ports so on this particular motherboard we've got six sata connectors on older motherboards you might notice that they're different speeds however all six of these they are actually six gigabits per second which is pretty decent for a machine of this age this is about i think it's about probably eight years old now like i say it's an i5 it's got 16 gigs of ram which is going to be good for running virtual machines if i if i decide to run any virtual machines in future or docker containers etc actual network attached storage servers don't really require that much memory you don't have to have much ram at all um to to to run unraid or as for general file sharing to be honest because um you're really just passing data and that data is getting stored to the disks however if you've got four gigabytes of ram or upwards i'd certainly recommend uh eight gigabytes of ram as a minimum now that's done i'm going to get the hard drives and we'll mount them into the caddies so we can then slide them into these into this drive bay here depending upon your particular case manufacturer they may have different ways of actually inserting installing hard drives some cheaper cases you'll probably just have little screws that attach the hard drives into the bays down the side however this particular case this corsair case we use these sort of plastic drive caddies so this particular caddy itself we just got these little retaining pins if you like uh which we use which we can use to just push the hard drive in it's semi-flexible so we can just flex and install the hard drives that way so i'm just gonna get the hard drive and ensure that we install it the correct way so here are the data and the power connectors so i'm just going to for example in this particular case we need to install it like so so i'm just going to line up the the screw holes with the retaining pins it's going to flex that open slightly and then there you go so that's our first hard drive and we're just going to repeat that process for our other hard drives and finally i now install the four terabyte western digital red pro drive into its drive tray so now we've actually got some other cables that are no longer needed and like i mentioned this particular power supply is modular so i can disconnect any of these cable looms that aren't required so i'm going to clean up the cables in a second but first of all i'm just going to slide these discs into our drive assembly so that we're ready to move on so personally as a convention i like to use i like to stick the the parity disks at the top just slide that one in here and then the other drives below it like so so a quick tip in future you may need to replace one of these drives if one fails the cool thing about unraid is that it will actually email you if a drive fails to open up the machine without having to pull them all out and disconnect them from the rear um i'd recommend you maybe put a label on them if they don't already have the serial number because unraid will actually tell you what the serial number is of the drive that's failed um or is starting to fail so if you're not seeing the serial number on these labels here i'd maybe recommend just printing off a little label maybe just with the last i don't know six characters from the serial number just to make your life easier if you do need to open up the side of your case in future to replace a failing or or dead drive okay so next up we need to turn the machine round we're going to connect our additional power connectors so that our power supply can power these drives in addition to that however we've also got this other ssd drive which we will install but for now what we'll do is we'll just turn the machine around and we'll provide power to these drives and feed the serial ata cables from the motherboard to each of these drives what i'm probably going to do is here on this particular motherboard we've got two sata ports up here and we've got an additional four down here so in order to try and keep things clean and tidy what i'll do is i'll power the the storage array from these four down here like i said in this particular motherboard they're all six gigabits per second so it's not like i'm running a slower speed for the drive array however if you are i would certainly recommend that you install your ssds for your cash pool um onto the faster sata ports so for example you may find that these two are actually faster in which case connect those directly to your your cache storage because those are the drives that are going to benefit from the higher speed from the motherboard okay so let's turn this around i'm going to take the back off as you can see we've now got access to connect these additional hard drives up to the power as well as our serial atas to the data cables so now i'm going to take this serial ata power cable and it's going to power each of the hard drives and feed this through to the power supply like so there doesn't have to be any order to this so just make sure that the the connectors line up correctly okay and as you can see the hard drives are actually quite close to where the back panel would sit so we have to kind of manipulate these cables a bit just so that we can get the back panel back on okay so now each of the hard drives have got power or will have power to them from the main power supply we now just need to feed through the data cables so not all serial ata power cables are created equally some you'll find are capable of six gigabits per second some will only support slower speeds so i just recommend that when if you are purchasing serial ata cables that you do get ones that match your drive speed if you're just going to buy a pack of these i'd personally recommend just getting six gigabit per second capable serial ata cables because they are backwards compatible i'm just feeding one through here now for the the cache drive that will be up here right okay so now that's done i'm just going to flip it back over and we'll connect up the hard drives at this point it's good to just do some cable management let's remove some of the modular power cables that were used for the graphics card um obviously we're not going to need them in this build so i'm just going to take them out and then we'll root the the cables for the hard drives okay so these are our sata connectors for the hard drives i purposely chose two of the the white tabbed ones here um for these two which are the storage drives and i've used the black connector here for the parity drive so just enables me to recall which ones which but obviously it doesn't matter at all so i'm just going to plug these in now it's always best to try and keep your cables tidy when when obviously building new machines or or modifying your internals just allows airflow to to maintain the best paths some motherboards will have some limitations if you've got an onboard m2 connector slot on your motherboard then sometimes they'll do weird things like disable certain serial ata ports to make that work so you just consult your manufacturer's motherboard if you get some strange results once you've set this up okay so that is now the three hard drives that are now connected to the serial ato ports on the motherboard i'm now going to connect the sata cable for our cash drive i'm going to use again we've got numbers on here so this one here is serial ata one so i'm just going to use that like i say the reason why i'm using the lower ports um for these is just to really keep things sort of standardized so if i you know mentally make a note of the fact that my storage pool is on these lower ports and it just keeps things simple and i know the cash drives are at the top like i might have mentioned earlier some motherboards um will have different speed sata connectors so if you do i mean all of mine on this particular motherboard are all table of six gigabits per second so my cache drive is now connected up here and my storage drives are connected on on these lower serial ata ports right okay so now i've got the cables connected the hard drives are in uh i'm now just going to do some cable management here tidy up some of these cables get rid of the ones which we no longer need i'm going to connect the cache drive shortly as well and then we'll put the case back on and then we'll go and take it over connect it up to a monitor plug in our usb stick and we'll go through some bios some recommended bios changes especially if you want to use this for virtualization and docker containers and then we'll start the installer right okay so the computer's now plugged in let's power it on and we're going to get access to the bios so you'll probably notice a screen appear in a second giving us some information as you can see press delete or f2 to enter the bios so i'm just going to press f2 on my particular computer your machine might be different just make sure you press f2 or the key that you require to get into the bios and then you should be greeted with the bioscreen in a second okay great so now we're in i can see that the correct amount of ram has been detected i'm going to click on saturn information just to uh just to check that the hard drives have all been detected correctly which they have on their right six gig ports perfect so i'm going to close that next up i'm going to go into advanced mode um your bios might be different to mine however the you just need to find the the equivalent on on your particular bios so i'm going to click on to advanced mode advanced mode yes and i'm specifically going to check that intel virtualization is enabled this is particularly important if we want to run docker containers or install virtual machines in future i'm just going to take this opportunity to check that out so i'm going to click on advanced and i'm going to go to cpu configuration and just check that intel virtualization technology is enabled which is it's great next up and the final thing which we need to do in here is we're going to change the boot order so we want to boot from the usb stick disable any other boot options so i'm going to select boot option 1 uefi sandisk so i'm going to select that boot option 2 i'm going to disable all the others and disable that disabled so this machine when we turn it on it's going to boot from our usb drive only okay so now we can do we can exit out here and save the changes so click exit exit save changes and reset so now we're rebooting with those bios changes we should now be taken to the unraid installer so we can just leave it alone here this is automatic that will just carry on in a second so great unraid is now booted up correctly as you can see here 1725 87 28 that is the ip address that i set when we created the installation media so at this point we can now shut down the machine if we just log in here quickly we'll shut it down and we can now remove the monitor disconnect the keyboard and mouse and we can now go and put this server over in a corner and just ensure that it's got power connected to it as well as a network cable everything else which we need to do on this server now we're going to jump across to a windows computer and we'll do it via the browser so it's going to log in so we're going to type in root there's no password by default i'm just going to now type in shutdown minus h so minus h for halt and then now and we'll give it a few seconds it's going to shut down all the services and spin the disks down okay perfect so now let's jump across and we'll go and start the installation configuration of unraid so as you can see i've typed in 172 25 87.28 that's the ip address that i set up originally when we created usb media however if you're using dhcp um your server would have picked up an automatic ip address from your home router or some other dhcp servers running on your network normally what you can do is you can log into that router and find out which ip address was allocated to the server if you didn't use any of the advanced settings the computer name will be tower so on the list of allocated ip addresses you should see the computer name tower and then it should give you the ip address for most of you most home networks would generally use the standard 192.168.1 zero dot something ip range alternatively you may find like a 10.1 address but that is solely dependent upon your network and how your network was set up however open up your browser you need to navigate to the ip address and then you should be presented with this screen here so when we first start up unraid we are given the option to allocate disks etc um and as i mentioned before i'm using a six terabyte western digital for my parity drive and just remember your parity drive must be the largest or equal to any of the other disks inside your storage array and your parity drives will limit and restrict the size of drives that you can add to your storage pool in future so it's always best to use your largest drive as the parity disk so here i'm going to select western digital and i can see here is the six terabyte one so i'm going to use that for my parity drive as you can see that's now set that as the parity drive and then underneath there we have disks one two three four five all the way down to 22. now we can change this drop down here to reduce the amount of drive drive allocation fields that we have available and so i might as well just do that now so technically we can actually have six here so for this particular setup i'm only going to use one parity drive i don't have enough disks to really warrant two and because this server really is just a backup server it's not mission critical i don't really need to have that extra layer of protection or fault tolerance so i'm now going to start assigning my disks so it really doesn't matter what order these these go in however i will i will choose the largest to the smallest so my next one i'm going to add is the western digital red pro so i'm going to select this one here four terabyte i'll give unread a second to just load and then finally three terabyte okay so that is now our storage array setup so now i'm going to add the sandisk cache drive so to do that we need to add it to our cache pool so to do that we're going to click on add pull i'm going to create a pool there called cache so i'm just going to call it cache and we've got one slot i'm just going to click add so it's highly recommended if you have multiple ssds to actually add more than one cache drive that will allow you to create a cache mirror so that if any of your cache drives fail you're not going to lose the data that is sitting on that pool however for me this is like i said this is just going to be used as a backup server my main server however does use multiple ssds for its cache pool to give that extra layer of fault tolerance so now you can see we've got this cache pool here which we've created and we can now assign our sandisk ssd plus so i'm going to click on that and that's now going to load you don't have to do this all at the start like i say you can come in you can stop the array and you can add or you can amend your your storage arrays and your and your cache pulls um whenever you like but i just thought for now and for the purpose of the video we'll just set up everything so you get an understanding or the theory behind adding these disks uh onto unraid okay so as you can see we've got the western digital six terabyte uses our parity drive inside our storage array we've got a four terabyte western digital red and we've got this three terabyte seagate drive as you can see it's pretty cool the interface it shows you the temperatures of the hard drives it'll also warn you about any errors on the drive later and it will flag up when discs go bad and you need to replace them it's a super easy process to swap out a drive and then when you reboot unraid you get the option to rebuild the array it is so simple to do and i really do recommend using unraid because of how unraid has implemented a parity protected array unlike normal raid 5 that you might get inside the likes of trunas or open media vault you know unraised you can add any disks of any size it really can be like a frankenstein setup you can just stick any types of drives in and you can add them to your storage pool and it works really really well so anyway now that the drives have been allocated we will get a warning here all existing data on this drive will be overwritten when the array arrays started so like i said earlier just make sure that you don't have any data on those disks they may be brand new disks if you're building a server from scratch but if you're like me and i'm just sort of clobbering together old reclaimed hard drives from other machines to make use of them on this particular server then you know just be aware that you need to get the data off first because these drives will be overwritten and formatted during this process so once we're done all we need to do is click start okay and like you'll see here you'll get various different messages we could simply ignore those this process is going to take some time it's essentially going to combine all of those disks into an unread parity protected array okay and something i should mention here if you're using old drives you may notice that when you first start the array and it goes through that initial process of building up the array you may have these these messages that appear here so it says unmountable unsupported partition layout so if you are using reclaimed disks with existing data you should also make sure that we scroll down and we and we see the unmountable disks present we need to click on this yes check checkbox here to say that we want to format all of these drives so by formatting the drives will then enable us to use within unraid so i'm going to click format as well here so again whilst this will take a while it's completely normal and we need to do that to ensure that these drives can be used inside unread so these drives are now formatted which is good however the parity sync part of this process will take a lot longer you can check on progress in the bottom right hand side of the browser as you can see our current data rebuild is at 0.4 percent this doesn't however stop us from configuring the rest of the system so let's just quickly jump in now to the users and share section so we can start creating a file share and i can show you how to connect to that file share from a windows based computer okay so heading up to here we can click on shares and as you can see we have some default shares so these shares are actually required and used by unraid so just as a quick overview as to what each of these shares do app data is used for storing docker information so we've got different docker containers information will be stored inside this share such as docker container specific application data and configuration details then we have domains so the domain share is used by um vms so virtual disks and vm configurations live with inside this domains share here then we have another default share called isos so isos is as you might expect where unraid will default look for um operating system installation media for when creating for when you create virtual machines inside um unread the isos can be stored in there you can access and drop your ubuntu server or your windows installation isos into that folder there and then when you create your virtual machines you can select to install from one of those isos and then we have the system so the system share is what is where unraid actually stores its configuration information so for example any customizations to the web interface all of the share information that unraid loads up at startup to expose the the folders and directories on this system to the network and then clicking on each of these you can see additional information so first of all let's go and create a new user so in this example i'm going to create a new user for myself i'm going to call this username this is the username that you'll be using to connect to the drive from other computers on your network so this is what windows would ask you for the username when you are connecting to the share so a quick tip if your username matches your current windows username and password you won't be prompted to log in when you access the share or mapper network drive in future so it's worth bearing that in mind um if however it does differ you will have to manually connect and provide a username password when you try to connect to the network drive or the share in this case so description is going to call it bobby and it's up to you so here you can add a custom image it doesn't actually do anything other than when you click on the users tab it just displays the list of users and it will show an avatar for that user so it's entirely up to you if you want to do that personally i don't do that i've never done that like i said i've got other servers running on raid and i simply don't use that icon and then here we're going to enter a password so we can just type in a password here and again there and then we click add i'm just going to click don't save unable now take a few seconds and the user has been added so if we click back to users using this little link up here you can see we've got bobby and we've got root so root is the user account that we're using obviously to log into unraid um we can click on this now and we can update the account if needs be we can set a password as well which i highly recommend you do because at the moment as you probably noticed you can log into the unread control panel without any authentication so i'm just now going to set a password up here and hit change and don't save okay so once you set a password for your root user you'll be taken back to the login screen so now just use that root account to log back in so username is root and then enter the password that you just typed in for that root account and then press enter it's up to you if you want to save obviously the credentials in your browser i'm not going to and as you can see the parity sync stroke data rebuild as you can see is still running out 1.5 like i say that will take many hours but that doesn't stop us setting up shares and using the system right now so we might as well just carry on doing that however just be aware that until that is completed if one of the hard drives dies you won't necessarily be protected unreal is also really good in the fact that data is actually spanned across disks and you can change the configuration with inside unraid so we can for example on the shares we can say how we want the data stored on a particular share so you can actually say that all data on a particular share should be stored to a certain disk maybe you've got a 7200 rpm drive which which you would prefer to have your um your plex media on so that'll be a really good use case for making sure that the data goes on that drive as opposed to a 5400 rpm drive which would obviously be slower so generally 7200 rpm drives are more prone to failure because they're running at higher disc speeds and i believe that research has shown that 5200 speed hard drives are actually more reliable over time so you may then want to for example move family photos and other things to a 50 to a 5400 rpm drive so it's really up to you how you want to configure unraid and we're really only just scratching the surface today but i just wanted to show you how you can create a share a simple share simple users we can assign some permissions to certain network shares and how we can access them from our computers so bear in mind we've now got our users set up we've got b allen and we've got a user called root we can now go and create a share and assign permissions to that user let's just quickly add another quick test user just so i can demonstrate how you can give permissions to certain users to certain shares so i'm going to click add user i'm going to create another user and we'll call this ruby and i'm just going to call it ruby there and we're just going to put password in of password and password again click add don't save okay and then now it's done we can now click on users again and you can see we've now got bobby and ruby so now we're going to head over to the shares tab next up we're going to create a couple of shares so the first year i'm going to add i'm going to click add share and we're going to call this one here um we call it footage a a share for storing video footage so in this example i'm going to create a share for our video footage i'm going to pretend that i myself i have access to upload all that footage to the server so i can write to this particular share but let's say ruby is another remote editor i only want her account to have read access to that share to prevent her from accidentally deleting any media footage that i've uploaded in the past obviously um that would be disastrous because we're not going to want to go back and re-record video footage because you're just going to use a whole lot of time so this would be a great setup say for example if you've got a team of editors um you want to have a certain account that can upload that media to the server but all the editors should have read-only access to prevent them from accidentally deleting any content so in this example i'm going to show you how i'd set up that share so we've got the share names called footage and then we've got the description a share for storing video footage so this option here use cache pool for new direct files and directories so if you only have a single drive in your cache pool you've got to be aware that until the mover which is which is a piece of software that unraid uses to move data from the fast ssd based cache to the parity particular array that data is until that has run and although you can run that manually from the unread interface which i'll demonstrate in a second that does leave your data vulnerable to um to to accidentally go missing if the drive was to fail so here in this instance our footage is important to me i don't want to have to re-record it and therefore because i only have one ssd in my cache array i'm going to make sure that i select no for use cache so by selecting no here um data that will be uploaded server although will be a lot slower because it's going it's writing to those spinning hard drives which are obviously slower than ssd storage it's also writing parity information back to the parity disk so although this is going to be a lot slower this does give us peace of mind that it's going to be protecting that parity array and if any of the drives fail we can still access the data and then we have the opportunity to replace the damaged disk to then bring that parity protection back so again i'm going to click no here we then got some other options which although i won't necessarily go through in any depth i will just briefly explain them if we hover and click on each of these these this will explain um the different details of as to how these options function so allocation method if we click on that you can see high water choose the lowest number disk with a free space still above the current high water mark the high water mark is initialized with the size the largest disk divided by two then obviously we've got we've got other options here such as fill up choose the lowest numbered disk that still has free space but you know you can obviously go away after watching this video going to do some further research into how you want to set up your own rate system however it's safe to say that most of the default options will work great for you so maybe you know start off with these settings and you can always go and change the settings later on you know you'll probably find that once you start using gun range you'll absolutely love it and you'll invest that time into going to read the unread website the documentation there so you can certainly go and customize your setup a later date if you like so again i'm just going to now hit add share so as you can see the share has now been added we've now got some additional options we've got export so clicking on this you can see that export basically shows you that the setting which determines whether it's visible or accessible again we want to be able to access this share on other machines so i'm going to leave this at yes use case sensor names i'm going to leave that as auto and and security we're going to change this now to private and then we're going to click on apply and then that will now give us some additional options so we can now allocate the type of access that the user has to this particular share so whilst we can if you've got other shares on your android system you can copy those shares in by using this drop down at the moment we don't have any other shares set up so i'm going to give myself as i mentioned read write access yeah i'm going to restrict ruby's access so that she can only read data from this share so i'm going to set her access to read only and then i'm going to hit apply so this share is now ready to use we can access it from all machines on our network and we can log in to gain the access that we require however let's just quickly go and create another share now add another share and we'll call the share photos so photos and we'll say photos use cash pool no so i've created a share called family photos which is going to allow anyone any user on the system to be able to read and write files to that share so i'm just going to accept the rest of the defaults and click add share and i'm now going to set the security level to private apply that i'm just going to give the required access levels to each of those users on our system so i'm going to hit the allen read write ruby rewrite and apply okay so now those shares are set up we can now access them from all machines on our network so now we'll do is head over to windows explorer and access those shares okay so on windows we would access the share by going forward forward slash 172 25 87 dot 28 which is the ips software server as i mentioned earlier so press enter here and as you can see we're now having those shares appear so we've got footage and photos this flash share however we're going to change that shortly by accessing this it actually gives us access to the usb content of the usb stick so this is where like i mentioned earlier on raid stores its configuration details but we're just going to secure up our unread server shortly so we'll actually be disabling access and prohibiting uh network access to that flash drive so anyway we've now got these two shares we've got footage and photos my user account can access them just fine as could rubies and we can now just upload some data to these shares maybe i'll just create a new folder in here and we'll call that test footage and we can access in there and we can create a new text file for example hello and then just this is a test save that exit it and as you can see on our share on our footage share we've now got a new a new directory created and inside there we've got text file this is the test and obviously as you would expect we can also photo share and we can copy files in etc so instead of having to type in the server's ip address into the explorer navigation bar we can actually map a network drive so when we start up our computer it will automatically map a network drive so that we can access those files faster and more easily so anyway we can right click on here and we can select map network drive we can choose a drive so as this is video footage maybe we might use the drive letter f so we can choose f there and we've got some options to reconnect to sign in or we can connect using different credentials unless you've got a specific need to log into that share with with different credentials i'd recommend leaving it at default it's up to you if you want this network drive to be mapped automatically i personally find it super useful so i'm just going to hit finish here and if we click on this pc you'll notice that we've now got this share appear here called footage and we're showing us the available storage space right so now we've got our share set up there is just so much that you can do with unraid and this video could go on for hours if i was to delve into all the other features that unraid can provide you with however for now i think this is a great first sort of primer an introduction into how you can build up an unraid server by reclaiming an old pc or even you know if you've got the money in the budget and you want to go out and actually build like a super powerful unmade server then by all means please do okay next up we're going to go and fix the issue with the flash share so as you can see by hovering over the uh the triangle here um you can see that the flash device is set as a public share and it says here to please change the share smb security click on flash above this message so to fix this and uh just to recap as you can see by navigating to our server on the network you can see we have this flash share here and this is publicly accessible anyone on the network can access that and could potentially delete files or change files with inside this share just to recap this flash share is actually the usb drive that unraid uses to store its operating system on and which it boots from so to fix that we just need to go back to here and as the message says please change share smb settings click on flash above this message so i'm going to click on flash so now we're going to do is we're going to change export to no and hit apply so export essentially says do we want this to share accessible over the network so by changing that to no we should now be able to go back to here and refresh this view and we should now only have our footage and our photos shares available to us which is great so that is now fully secure um we know that um we know that unraid is now set up securely and the only shares are available are the ones which we've created as part of this video so going back over to the dashboard now um we can see a whole load of information android's really good at showing us information about our server as you can see with the parity sync is is still working at the moment um it tells us about any errors any disk problems temperatures on our disks it tells us the amount of utilization of these hard drives as well as ram utilization cpu utilization it'll output the cpu model that you have on your server information about your motherboard uptime information as well as network card information and traffic so we can also do other things so for example in here if we click edit we can actually change what our case looks like okay this is quite trivial i guess but it's quite a nice little customization feature for your run rate server so you can actually also upload a custom image here so if you don't find one that suits your server or one that you're not happy with you could use this option here to select and upload your own custom icon there's a whole lot of other settings which we can do on the server we can access the actual terminal of the server here so root tower tower remember is the default name that unraid will give to this server when you first install it all those settings however can be changed inside the settings window we can click on identification and as you can see here the array must be stopped before we can make changes but we can change the server name here we can set a description and we can set other model information if needs be so like i said unraid is a great tool it's got loads of features and functionality i'll quickly just walk you through the different tabs now just to show you what they are and what they can do so this is the dashboard page this gives us an overview of our server it shows any running docker containers any running virtual machines as i've mentioned i've not installed or configured any at the moment this video i wanted to keep this video as short as possible just to show you how to set up a network attached storage server on unraid and to give you that basic file sharing functionality we then got the main tab and the main tab really just shows us disk information disk utilization how much storage we have free and available we've got options here which allows us to manipulate the array and tells us other things like clear stats we can run the mover so the mover like i mentioned is where it moves files from your cache pool or your ssds to the parity protected array so although that is run automatically nightly i believe you can come in here and click move to automatically move those files across so as i mentioned earlier on in the video whilst it might not be a good idea for you to use a single cache drive if you're moving important information because if you only have a single cash drive and that cash drive fails you essentially lose the data on that cash drive if it's not been moved to the parity protected array then you could if you still wanted to benefit from the transfer speed you could come in here and click move and know that you've manually moved that content onto the parity protected array we've got other options here like we can reboot the server we can shut down the server so everything in here is really about the disks and the actual server itself it's operations for the server then we've got the shares tab which we looked at briefly earlier on the video where we created the shares we can we can actually view the data on these shares so if we click on photos you can see the contents of that isos etc and applicator we can also click on the names of the shares to be able to reconfigure how the share stores data what if we only want data to exist on certain drives or to exclude certain drives as well as we can change the configuration of how data is stored on the array so yeah so simply clicking on a share will open up the additional settings this is where we also can change access permissions to that particular share then we've got the users tab again which we've already looked at earlier we can add users here we can click on a user we can change access for that user to certain shares as well as reset their password on this screen next up we've got the settings tab settings tab gives us a whole load of different options for various different things that relate specifically to our unread server setup like i said we won't really delve into much in in this particular video but there is a whole load of cool stuff here which we can uh revisit and investigate later next up we've got plugins so android has full support for for plugins um for doing all kinds of things some really great plugins out there one which i definitely recommend you looking at is the community plugins so that is a separate system where you can pull in likes of plex all kinds of applications from proxy servers to video encoding to other web-based features really really great really really great but like i said we can revisit this in another video if you like more content on unraid next up we've got docker so you can add docker containers here um we can add them we can manage them all from here the cool thing about unraid is is they'll also tell you when there are updates for docker containers and from this screen we can very easily just update a docker container uh with a single click next up we've got vms so vm stands for virtual machines we can add kvm based virtual machines here so we can click on add and we've got the option to add all different kinds of operating systems so as you might expect we've got all the different windows versions and windows 11 support for unraid is actually coming in the next release so although you're not actually seeing it here um it's coming so just hold tight next up we've got tools and tools there are all kinds of different things in this section so we can look at the running processes that are currently running on our server diagnostics so here's where you could get information about if you've got issues with your machine etc hardware profiles page maps all kinds of different information as well as updating the unread operating system we can click update os and we can check for updates here uh obviously we only installed this yesterday so we're going to be running the latest version so we're fine as you can see we're up to date so if you decide that you really do like on raid and it's something that you want to continue with after the 30-day trial um you can then activate unrage using the registration icon underneath tools registration and then you can basically use the information on this page to register your unmade license so by clicking on purchase key this will take you to the unread website where you can then choose the version of unread that you want to purchase once purchase is complete you'll then be given a link to copy in here simply paste that into here and click install key that key is then linked to the usb um drive the unreal that you copied and you're running unread from so the great thing about unread licenses is that you get free updates with them for any versions any versions going forwards if you find that you really do like using unraid i definitely think it's worth the money an investment this video isn't sponsored at all um i'm just you know personally i absolutely love unraid as a set and forget operating system for providing that network attached storage functionality and the ability to add drives of any size into your storage array and and grow your system over time so i've really enjoyed doing this video it's been a video that i've wanted to do for a while now i wanted to share my love of unrage and show you guys that you know synology or qnap aren't the only ways to go you can actually build a super powerful system at home by reclaiming an old computer you know don't throw them out you know things shouldn't go to landfill unless they really need to the only thing i would say maybe about using an older computer is that obviously power consumption on older computers are generally higher than more modern hardware so it's kind of a trade-off as to whether you want to go and build an awesome awesome home nas go out and buy some hardware stick it all together you know it's so fun building your own network servers you know this is just one example i personally like to reuse my old machines i don't see the point of going out and buying new stuff i certainly don't like sending things to landfill so you know hopefully this video has demonstrated to you you know just what you can do with old computers and especially you know if you're if you're now looking to you want to use the latest and greatest version of uh windows 11 and machine is not supported you know you know spend that spend the money buy a basic license for unraid if you've got some old hard drives or you want to go and invest in some hard drives bang them in your in in your run rate server and you know you've you've got that you've got that additional storage space you know you're protected by the parity protection on the of the unraid array and um yeah i think i think you know why wouldn't you why wouldn't you if you got an old computer you know utilize it utilize it uh you know you can share that data with people on your network and then when you go through and look at those more advanced features you know you can expose services over the internet you can share your plex library uh with your friends or family uh you know you can just create like you could host your own next cloud server you know utilize that massive amount of storage that you've got now because you can just keep loading disks in allow people to use your next cloud server for tons of storage literally the possibilities of van raid are pretty much endless you can do so much stuff there are so many great community created applications and docker containers out there um you know obviously i don't really want to go and do another video if you guys aren't going to find it useful but if you do and you want me to delve into the power of docker um and specifically running you know docker apps for unraid then you know let me know in the comment section below because i will be more than happy to create those videos as well i can show you what i'm also running on my other server and just you know what you can do i think it's a fantastic tool okay guys so that is the end of the video um the i'm going to leave it here the parity array is still building but like i mentioned uh when that's done all the drives going to go green and you're going to be good to go so if you liked the video please leave it a thumbs up give it a like um if you've got any questions comments about unraid specifically or about this video or any of the things i've mentioned in this video please leave me a comment in the section below and please hit the subscribe button if you're interested in this kind of content uh i cover lots of different things um mainly technology related obviously so things like unread network setups software the cloud development topics so i do all kinds of stuff really so you know please consider subscribing and hit the bell notification so that you're notified in future

Channel: The Bear Tech

Views: 2,499

Keywords: #unraid, #nas, #serverbuild, #synology, #pcbuild, #reclaimedhardware, #truenas

Id: r9n4hMFBqvo

Length: 57min 47sec (3467 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021