9 ms·

What Is Unraid?

84 points by aargh_aargh 5y ago

yumiris 5y ago
I used unRAID a while back for nearly two years. It's delightfully convenient for managing Docker containers, multiple disks w/ data parity, network file sharing, and even VMs with passthroughs. The last feature, especially, is absolutely killer with how easy it is to accomplish in unRAID. Whilst a lot of unRAID's functionality can be achieved with a bit of tinkering and reading, its UI does save a lot of time and keeps things very simple. For example, I have yet to figure out a way of achieving GPU passthrough on an Optimus laptop without my hair going grey -- a part of me feels like unRAID might simplify it, despite it being an OS for servers rather than laptops. One thing I'd absolutely wish for is ZFS support. I haven't looked into how ZFS's licence might interfere with its integration, but if integration is possible, it would be magnificent. Nevertheless, unRAID is splendid at what it strives to do and buying a pro licence for it was absolutely worth it!
- tomschlick 5y ago
  There is a zfs plugin now. Here is a video outlining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umKXHO-hr5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umKXHO-hr5w
- syshum 5y ago
  ZFS would kill the main reason alot of people use unRAID. which is the ability to use different sized disks with out sacrificing space, and the ability to adhoc add new disks ZFS would require the use of all the same size disk, or your udev would be limited to the size of your smallest disk, and make adding new disks much harder
shmoogy 5y ago
I moved from FreeNAS/TrueNAS after 5ish years to Unraid. So far, it's been a lot easier to get things working the way I wanted. Worth the cost of entry
vanchor3 5y ago
I've been using unRAID for a while now, and it feels more like a community GitHub project rather than a closed-source commercial product I paid for. There are plenty of weird issues that don't really make any sense but are apparently "by design", and support usually hasn't been helpful in my experience. I ran into an issue once where the Web interface wasn't working properly. I looked online for a way to restart the service via SSH, since none of the commands I could think of worked. I then came across the amazing answer from one of the official forum moderators that basically said "you don't need to know how to restart the service, just stop having the problem." I could have rebooted the entire system, but there were several Dockers running as well as other systems that had the storage mounted that I didn't want to interrupt for a simple web server issue. There's also the fun BTRFS and Docker issues. Maybe it's just me, but filling up a file system shouldn't completely corrupt it. There are rules you can set such as "don't copy a file unless 30GB is free" but somehow it seems to ignore this. You later find your Dockers no longer work if you restart them, giving the unhelpful error of "Error code 403", despite them working fine moments ago. Sometimes it just seems to do this for fun without the disk filling up. I could go on and on about all the weird issues and odd design choices.
- n42 5y ago
  it’s such a pet peeve, but the unRAID community normalizing the usage of “Dockers” for “Docker containers” makes me twitch.
  - vanchor3 5y ago
    That's a good point. I never thought of that before, unfortunately I tend to pickup bad habits like that by watching the way others write. Though I do have to wonder if the Docker team would have used that term were it not already a registered trademark. I suppose it does sound a little silly.
    - n42 5y ago
      that's not your bad habit, that's just how language evolves naturally. like I said, a pet peeve. the part that makes me twitch is that the evolution of the term is happening in a hobbyist community, where I've never heard a professional use the term. when I read it it doesn't make linguistic since to me -- a "Docker" is not a thing, what is its plural? anyway, you do you.
elliotpage 5y ago
I've used UnRAID for just over two years and it works a treat. Well worth the cost of entry.
4kelly 5y ago
+1 for unraid. I’ve been using it for about 4 years. IMO it’s usecase sits in between synology and a completely self administered server. I found synology features great, but was frustrated about the hardware lock in. I also didn’t want to spend too much time tinkering with a bare bones server. Enter unraid. I use it as a backup server, fileshare, time machine backup. As well as plex and other popular self hosted docker images.
Sparkle-san 5y ago
Unraid is interesting. I considered it years ago but didn't want to spend the money at the time so I went with OpenMediaVault. But at this point, I just run snapraid + UnionFS.
francislavoie 5y ago
My biggest annoyance is that they don't provide users a first-party way to run their own containers from a source Dockerfile. As a maintainer of an open source project, this is incredibly annoying because our plugin system is build/compile-time, and many users need to use certain plugins. They also flip the order of Docker port mappings, where `-v "8080:80"` would become "80 <- 8080" or w/e in their UI. And a bunch of other idiosyncrasies with configuring containers. And yeah, as others have said, "dockers" terminology hurts me deeply.
- hanklazard 5y ago
  The port mapping flip in the UI is seriously baffling. Not even that it happened but that it continues to be case. I feel that overall my unraid experience has been good and they certainly make the implementation of some basic services and plug-ins really easy. However I do find myself looking at more fully manual, open-source “home server” solutions and wonder if it would be worth a switch …
jpgvm 5y ago
Tried it. Decided for my needs that my Arch + ZFS based NAS is still the way to go. At the end of the day it's critical data for me that while backed up to tarsnap would take a very long time to restore. By just using ZFS and having regular scrubs etc scheduled properly I have very high confidence my array will always be online when I need it. I could probably build a similar level of trust in another product but ZFS (Under OpenSolaris, then Illumos, then FreeBSD and finally Linux - all the same pool btw!) has earnt my trust over many years.
mise_en_place 5y ago
I was using it as a headless KVM server but the PHP panel is rather buggy. Starting a VM doesn’t always kick it off, and had numerous issues with updating. It just lacks the polish of a commercial product.
Cyph0n 5y ago
I’ve heard great things about Unraid, but ended up choosing Proxmox to manage my home server. I am fairly tech savvy and don’t need anything “complicated”, so Proxmox works perfectly for me. But I’d love to hear any thoughts from others who have tried using both!
- pocketsand 5y ago
  Agree. I went to Proxmox and virtualize TrueNAS. Best of both worlds IMO and not at all any more difficult to manage.
  - nuker 5y ago
    Why not just TrueNAS?
    - pocketsand 5y ago
      Virtualization on TrueNAS/BSD leaves a lot to be desired and in my experience just wasn't nearly as mature as on Linux with KVM/qemu, etc. Likewise, BSD jails seemed to me to be really well thought out, but when it came to getting them to work for me to run little apps/services like I could with Docker, or even a full-fat VM, I quickly gave up because the juice didn't seem worth the squeeze. Whereas on Proxmox it's a cinch for me to run like 20 different VMs/linux containers that I use for various projects/jobs/etc. Huge ecosystem and really easy to take advantage of massive community of linux/Debian users/Docker/etc. TrueNAS Scale, which is based on Debian, I think reflects an acknowledgement of the pain points of working around BSD for the types of services a lot of people want to use their NAS for. I don't think I'm ready to switch yet, but maybe in a year or two it will be a great solution.
      - xoa 5y ago
        Don't disagree with you that using TrueNAS Core as a general server/VM platform (some other things as well) has pain points. Some of which are BSDisms, some just as you say due to the plain fact that the community is vastly smaller. Even simple stuff like ports frequently being a bit out of date, or lacking the diversity you'd find elsewhere. Nothing that can't be worked around, but always some extra time on a whole different thing which in more popular environments (be it Proxmox/KVM/ESXi or whatever) would just be there and then get out of your way. That said I do think though a NAS is one of the things, even in a lot of homelab environments, that's actually worth its own hardware separate from the VM if one can swing the extra cost & space. I virtualized NAS for a while too but since I wanted to run VMs themselves off the NAS as well as a lot of other stuff, have a good backup/restore story etc, I found it started to get unpleasantly circular in terms of bootstrapping from a cold start or restore. Also, the hardware requirements for a good NAS are fairly distinct from a lot of what I wanted for virtualizing. It's not impossible to cram lots of hot swap drives and full size PCIe cards including GPUs for passthrough and tons of CPU and tons of RAM into a single 4U by any means, but splitting things out made it a lot simpler to optimize each side better. The NAS could be smaller, cooler, quieter and good at its own thing. After all-in-one I ended up with 3 distinct boxes: router/gateway (OPNsense), VM system, and NAS system. I know others have gone totally different directions, from AIO boxes to wild K8s clusters doing it all, but I feel like those provide a decent balance of flexibility and stability/isolation, I can mess with stuff and feel confidence in basic network connectivity or storage. Isolation also means not feeling quite the same pressure if one platform isn't as good at something as another, so long as it's good at its own specialty. >TrueNAS Scale, which is based on Debian, I think reflects an acknowledgement of the pain points of working around BSD for the types of services a lot of people want to use their NAS for. I'm a bit bummed philosophically there. I've used BSDs for a very long time, like much of the philosophy if not all the warts, and fundamentally losing diversity in software platforms even if open source is concerning. At the same time it's hard to get around the raw power of network effects in tech, and Linux has a ton of resources and eyes thrown at it at this point. I have no plans or interest in moving in the near future either, but it's hard not to feel like the headwinds are building a bit for TrueNAS Core. Though FreeBSD continues to put out excellent releases, and it's gotten this far. I've found myself on the underdog "but I think it's technically better!" losing side of a lot of tech in my life though :). It's always a balancing act in how much it's worth working on a tool itself vs using the tool to do other work.
flatiron 5y ago
I got lazy in my old years. I just use rclone and google drive.
hnaccount141 5y ago
I've been using Unraid for a few years now and while it's served me well I hesitate to recommend it. Were I to start over today I'd definitely be looking at TrueNAS Scale or rolling my own. Unraid seems to be targeting a rather niche market of people who are used to building PCs for running Windows and would like to have a home server and self host some apps (usually Plex and the 'arr stack if we're being honest). It does a good job of making all this accessible via a nice web UI with basic hypervisor and container management features. The app store they have for Docker containers is great for exposing new users to what's out there. The problem I've found is that while it does a good job of offering a low barrier to entry, the ceiling is quite low as well. It seems to me that the type of user they're trying to attract is also the type who would want to learn more and tinker, at which point Unraid's limitations will start to chafe. If you've used other Linux distros you'll find the lack of a package manager and other atypical features frustrating. Once you want to go beyond their app store for containers the web UI becomes limiting. There's no first-party docker compose support. The hypervisor UI is quite limited as well, lacking even the ability to create and manage snapshots. Of course you can manage all this from the command line, but at that point you may as well use another OS with a more performant and reliable filesystem. There are also some bizarre security choices that they've seemed to have had difficulty moving past. The web UI is only accessible as root, for example.
- tylergetsay 5y ago
  In the same boat, I recently switched to running a VM on top of unRAID and treating that as my app server and unRAID as a software raid host, it feels safer than rolling my own
- syshum 5y ago
  Depends on your use case for me I use Unraid for my "production" home storage for 3 main reasons 1. It is easy to administer I dont want to have screw with it when I just want to watch a movie from my emby server, or get some file I am working on 2. It allows me to disparate disk sizes, and expand the storage at will. Something TrueNAS and other ZFS based system struggle with 3. The Docker interface is the easiest I have ever found I want the "one click" service experience for my home services server. I do not want a package manager, or to ssh in to the server and start doing things. That said i also run 2 other Storage servers that are TrueNAS, I use them for backups, and doing the things you talk about. However with TrueNAS I have to plan out my Storage like I would my enterprise arrays, a 5 year storage plan, and preallocate the space when I build the array, because expanding it after the fact is a pain in the a*. (an no I am not going to keep adding mirror pair vdev's) That is the key here, use the correct tool for the job, and for a production server to run "home services" like emby, plex, gitea, paperless, SAMBA shares, Home Assistant, etc nothing IMO beats unraid, not even TrueNAS
recov 5y ago
Slightly on topic, a nice low maintence (other than a daily/weekly backup/scrub script) option without the need for a specific OS is mergerFS, combined with snapRaid. The main benefit is you can add and remove drives/directories willy-nilly. It's been stable for me for the past 3 years, it just works. https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs https://github.com/amadvance/snapraid/ https://github.com/amadvance/snapraid/
unixhero 5y ago
I just use Proxmox and ZFS on an honest to god X86 box.
- vdfs 5y ago
  Proxmox is better for running VMs and LXC containers, You can run TrueNAS or unRaid on top of it with disks passthrou
Ir0nMan 5y ago
I have been an UNRAID user for years now and I have been very satisfied with he product.
aborsy 5y ago
What does Unraid offer over Xpenology? Synology is perfect as a NAS. If you want NAS+ general server, you are better off separating the two.
- justinsaccount 5y ago
  Despite what you might read online, Xpenology is illegal pirated software. Last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621753
  - generalizations 5y ago
    That link didn't seem very conclusive. What license is Synology distributed under? Only one I found was the GPL3.
    - justinsaccount 5y ago
      It's proprietary software. They release the source for any of the licensed components that they use that require source to be made available. Just like Apple does for OS X at https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ The fact that such downloads exist does not mean that the synology software is open source. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or misinformed.
Havoc 5y ago
I suspect in the long run truenas scale is going to eat their lunch. Regardless, many seem happy with unraid so glad it exists
fomine3 5y ago
Unraid looked like hobby when I looked in 2019. IIRC they don't require me to set root password but enabled WebUI by default. SSD "cache" solution was made by moving files by cron, but it seemed that they don't care race condition.
boxingrock 5y ago
closing in on 10 years with unraid, here's a few key points: - trades more raw storage for slower performance, only one parity drive is needed - if two drives die, you can still recover the rest of the data, no special recovery software needed - allows you to mix drive brands, sizes, smr, cmr, etc, etc... - allows you to expand one drive at a time, buy whatever is on sale when you need it - drives spin down when not in use, saving on power and replacements if you got a ton of media, it's pretty solid tech. the one thing i'd like to see is an "unraid lite", a headless solution with a cheap yearly fee. something to keep generating income for the team while allowing the vets more flexibility. because at the 10 year mark, it'll have worked out to $15/year for me and since i'll be virtualizing it again, i only really need security updates for kernel, ssh and samba.
SxC97 5y ago
I have a real split opinion on Unraid. On the one hand, It's probably one of the most versatile pieces of software that I've ever used. I use it in "production" at home and its filling half a dozen use cases for me. The first strength is VM support. I have ~25 VMs configured as I'm in grad school and it seems like every professor has a specific OS they want you to use. I use a MacBook at home and most professors require you to download and run a different Linux distro, or they just assume you have a windows PC handy. This wasn't a problem when I was going to school in person where I has access to a computer lab, but it is a problem as a mac user at home. Fedora, Ubuntu, Kali, and Windows 10. This was the OS requirement for just one semester of Advanced Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, and Network Security classes and running multiple VMs on my old laptop at the time was very taxing. The other beautiful thing about Unraid is how easy it is to pass through a GPU compared to other NAS distros. I have a windows VM configured with a GPU passed through that I use for gaming and the occasional CAD work (for fun). Before Unraid, I tried Proxmox, but after a month of work, I wasn't able to get GPU passthrough to work and the community wasn't any help. On unraid, it took maybe 3 days with plenty of help from the community. I also plan on running a Home Assistant VM if I ever get more into smart home stuff and move away from Homekit. I also have 100+ docker containers configured. Many of them are based on a home media streaming stack. *arr stack, ombi, jellyfin for movies and tv. Komga, calibre, and mylar for ebooks and comics. Podgrab and airsonic for podcasts. Jdownloader and deluge for everything else. The rest are small apps used for learning or just self hosting some apps. Things like Nextcloud, Paperless, rss, pihole, and a minecraft server. I had a data scare a couple years ago where I had written some journal entries in an app in college and the app had gone subscription and locked my access to my entries behind a pay wall. Ever since then, I use plain text and self hosted apps for everything important. I looked at other solutions for home server operating systems but many of them ran freeBSD, and while this did add ZFS support, it came at the cost of using jails instead of docker and at the time I knew that the apps I wanted to use had docker support, but I wasn't sure if they had decent jail support. The last selling point is the NAS features. I started with just a 1tb m.2 ssd to run a virtualization server and I was able to quickly add capacity via HDDs without screwing up my config. It started with just a small movie collection and quickly spiraled out to downloading every console game made between 1976 and 2007 so I could emulate them from any client device with almost no local storage. While the features of ZFS are great, I wouldn't want to give up the flexibility of adding one disk at a time. Also the easy to use wireguard UI was a big selling point. I found it much easier to use than configuring it via the terminal for some reason. On the other hand, it is also one of the buggiest pieces of software that I have ever willingly paid money for. The community support is great and a lot of the development is guided by community involvement, but as I get more familiar with homelabbing, I can feel the rough edges. I regularly have disks just drop out of the array and when looking online, it looks like this is a well known issue. I found community posts from _years_ ago saying that all you have to do is stop the array, remove the disk, start the array, then stop it again and re-add the disk and wait ~24hr for a parity check to run. This has been a known issue for years and it's still not fixed. Also if you don't have enough ram in the system and start a vm, the whole system just crashes and drops a random disk before making the web-ui unresponsive. Another known issue that hasn't been fixed. The VM configs also breaks sometimes for no reason. I had a bugged vm template that just froze the entire system the second I started it. No indication of what happened, just had to destroy the vm and delete the template via ssh before making a new one. The lack of docker-compose support is also frustrating. The terminal experience is also anemic. No package manager installed by default and many other normal system utilities are not pre-installed. This makes working on the system via ssh very frustrating. I've also lost some data because while Unraid is good at _adding_ disks, it's still terrible at _replacing_ disks. Just swapping out 2 HDDs in the array and 2 SSDs in the cache pool took weeks and the process was nerve racking due to the aforementioned disk dropping issue. I also ended up corrupting some data on some drives. I don't know how bad the damage is, but I know that some docker containers don't work anymore and my windows vm had to be completely reconfigured from scratch. I haven't even tried running some of the Linux distros I have configured but I don't have high hopes after the Windows debacle. I imagine that the coming ZFS support with RAIDz expansion will alleviate some of these pain points (like the missing snapshots feature), but I still feel like Unraid need to stop adding new features for a year and spend a year coming out with a "Snow Leopard" release. Just something that focuses on basic system stability and usability. Ultimately, I think I would recommend Unraid to a very small niche of people. If you are just getting started with homelabbing and want a flexable, scalable system, go with Unraid. If you care about stability, have the money to bulk buy drives, and don't mind a little more fiddling, I would probably recommend 2 systems. Something like truenas scale on a box for NAS stuff and something like a Proxmox box for VMs. EDIT: Speaking of Snow Leopard! I forgot to mention one of my most annoying bugs. I wanted to set up a time machine share on the array to back up my MacBook and it seems like time machine support has been broken for years despite this being an advertised feature! I feel like they should either fix the issue or remove support all together, anything in between is just frustrating. Instead I have to use chronosync and just manually copy files over to an array share but it's not quite as seamless as using the built in time machine feature.
zeagle 5y ago
I went with zfs on Debian over unraid, freenas, or omv for my current server. This way I have full control and updates for the system with out nasty surprises later that they changed some standard way of running a service or library. I've used QNAP with optware/entware then lenovoemc and never again. It's a lot easier to learn to set up smbd, NFS, nginx than deal with kludged together solutions later.
- joshbaptiste 5y ago
  I followed the plex media server model given here.. https://perfectmediaserver.com/tech-stack/snapraid.html https://perfectmediaserver.com/tech-stack/snapraid.html MergeFS over XFS volumes and SnapRaid for redundancy
vanillax 5y ago
Unraid is frustrating. Its good at making a dead simple nas and offers enough customizations with the "community apps" that you are stepping into the world of mixing NAS with a linux server. No docker compose support is maddening. Using the UI to customize docker apps absolutely blows. Every thing that you should be able to do requires 3rd party plugins. Ie you "can" do docker compose with a 3rd party plugin. You "can" do zfs if you get a third party plugin. You "can" mount drives outside the array with a plugin. I gave up after the RC update bricked my flashdrive and support told me well your flash drive was just bad and well its your fault you didnt backup. Im now on Proxmox + ZFS + VMs and I couldnt be happier.
denkmoon 5y ago
TrueNAS is the software you are looking for.
alexjplant 5y ago
The first and last time I heard anything about unRaid before now was almost 15 years ago. I ran a home RAID server a few years back and just used CentOS in conjunction with mdraid and Webmin without a second thought. Given all of the limitations people are mentioning in this thread I fail to see what unRaid's value add is over a solution like mine for anybody with more than a modicum of Linux expertise.
vermaden 5y ago
With ZFS you can just partition larger and smaller disks to fir your needs. Lets assume you have 3 disks: - 10 TB - 5 TB - 8 TB Here is how you would partition them: disk A - 10 TB <_ZFS RAIDZ - disk 1/3 - 5 TB SIZE_> | <_ZFS MIRROR - disk 1/2 - 3 TB SIZE_> | <_ZFS STRIPE - disk 1/1 - 2 TB SIZE_> disk B - 5 TB <_ZFS RAIDZ - disk 2/3 - 5 TB SIZE_> disk C - 8 TB <_ZFS RAIDZ - disk 3/3 - 5 TB SIZE_> | <_ZFS MIRROR - disk 2/2 - 3 TB SIZE_> This way you can create three separate pools: 5 TB each disk ZFS RAIDZ = 10 TB effective space with redundantion 3 TB each disk ZFS MIRROR = 3 TB effective space with redundantion 2 TB single disk ZFS STRIPE = 2 TB effective space without redundantion You can of course 'connect' the two redundant ZFS pools into one with these commands below on creation. This is a test that I just did on FreeBSD but with GB units instead of TB as with real disks: # truncate -s 10G disk10 # truncate -s 5G disk5 # truncate -s 8G disk8 # mdconfig.sh -c disk10 IN: created vnode at /dev/md0 # mdconfig.sh -c disk5 IN: created vnode at /dev/md1 # mdconfig.sh -c disk8 IN: created vnode at /dev/md2 # gpart create -s GPT md0 md0 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 5g md0 md0p1 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 3g md0 md0p2 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs md0 md0p3 added # gpart create -s GPT md1 md1 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs md1 md1p1 added # gpart create -s GPT md2 md2 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 5g md2 md2p1 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs md2 md2p2 added # zpool create HYBRID raidz /dev/md0p1 /dev/md1p1 /dev/md2p1 mirror /dev/md0p2 /dev/md2p2 # zpool create NONRED /dev/md0p3 # zpool list HYBRID NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT HYBRID 17.2G 161K 17.2G - - 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE - # zfs list HYBRID NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT HYBRID 126K 12.0G 27.3K /HYBRID # zpool status HYBRID pool: HYBRID state: ONLINE config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM HYBRID ONLINE 0 0 0 raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 md0p1 ONLINE 0 0 0 md1p1 ONLINE 0 0 0 md2p1 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 md0p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 md2p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors # zpool list NONRED NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT NONRED 1.88G 108K 1.87G - - 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE - # zfs list NONRED NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT NONRED 108K 1.75G 24K /NONRED # zpool status NONRED pool: NONRED state: ONLINE config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM NONRED ONLINE 0 0 0 md0p3 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors This means that instead of that 12 GB space on real 10/8/5 TB disks you would get 12 TB of redundant space and 2 TB of non-redundant space. Instructions for real SATA disks on FreeBSD: # gpart create -s GPT ada0 ada0 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 5t ada0 ada0p1 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 3t ada0 ada0p2 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs ada0 ada0p3 added # gpart create -s GPT ada1 ada1 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs ada1 ada1p1 added # gpart create -s GPT ada2 ada2 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 5t ada2 ada2p1 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs ada2 ada2p2 added # zpool create HYBRID raidz /dev/ada0p1 /dev/ada1p1 /dev/ada2p1 mirror /dev/ada0p2 /dev/ada2p2 You can also create two separate ZFS pools like that: # zpool create RAID5 raidz /dev/ada0p1 /dev/ada1p1 /dev/ada2p1 # zpool create MIRRORED mirror /dev/ada0p2 /dev/ada2p2 The mdconfig.sh script is here: - https://github.com/vermaden/scripts/blob/master/mdconfig.sh https://github.com/vermaden/scripts/blob/master/mdconfig.sh Hope that helps. After all the 'stable' years with ZFS/OpenZFS I would just not trust 'some new hybrid RAID' implementation ... not to mention all the ZFS features like compression/deduplication/snapshots/clones/copies/bookmarks/send/recv/... Regards.
yboris 5y ago
I'm a big fan of DrivePool (by StableBit) for Windows. You can add as many hard drives as you want and pool them together into one, optionally add duplication, and if anything fails, each hard drive is just an NTFS volume that can be accessed with any other computer. https://stablebit.com/ https://stablebit.com/

84 points by aargh_aargh 5y ago

I used unRAID a while back for nearly two years. It's delightfully convenient for managing Docker containers, multiple disks w/ data parity, network file sharing, and even VMs with passthroughs. The last feature, especially, is absolutely killer with how easy it is to accomplish in unRAID. Whilst a lot of unRAID's functionality can be achieved with a bit of tinkering and reading, its UI does save a lot of time and keeps things very simple. For example, I have yet to figure out a way of achieving GPU passthrough on an Optimus laptop without my hair going grey -- a part of me feels like unRAID might simplify it, despite it being an OS for servers rather than laptops. One thing I'd absolutely wish for is ZFS support. I haven't looked into how ZFS's licence might interfere with its integration, but if integration is possible, it would be magnificent. Nevertheless, unRAID is splendid at what it strives to do and buying a pro licence for it was absolutely worth it!

tomschlick 5y ago
There is a zfs plugin now. Here is a video outlining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umKXHO-hr5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umKXHO-hr5w
syshum 5y ago
ZFS would kill the main reason alot of people use unRAID. which is the ability to use different sized disks with out sacrificing space, and the ability to adhoc add new disks ZFS would require the use of all the same size disk, or your udev would be limited to the size of your smallest disk, and make adding new disks much harder

shmoogy 5y ago

I moved from FreeNAS/TrueNAS after 5ish years to Unraid. So far, it's been a lot easier to get things working the way I wanted. Worth the cost of entry

vanchor3 5y ago

I've been using unRAID for a while now, and it feels more like a community GitHub project rather than a closed-source commercial product I paid for. There are plenty of weird issues that don't really make any sense but are apparently "by design", and support usually hasn't been helpful in my experience. I ran into an issue once where the Web interface wasn't working properly. I looked online for a way to restart the service via SSH, since none of the commands I could think of worked. I then came across the amazing answer from one of the official forum moderators that basically said "you don't need to know how to restart the service, just stop having the problem." I could have rebooted the entire system, but there were several Dockers running as well as other systems that had the storage mounted that I didn't want to interrupt for a simple web server issue. There's also the fun BTRFS and Docker issues. Maybe it's just me, but filling up a file system shouldn't completely corrupt it. There are rules you can set such as "don't copy a file unless 30GB is free" but somehow it seems to ignore this. You later find your Dockers no longer work if you restart them, giving the unhelpful error of "Error code 403", despite them working fine moments ago. Sometimes it just seems to do this for fun without the disk filling up. I could go on and on about all the weird issues and odd design choices.

n42 5y ago
it’s such a pet peeve, but the unRAID community normalizing the usage of “Dockers” for “Docker containers” makes me twitch.
- vanchor3 5y ago
  That's a good point. I never thought of that before, unfortunately I tend to pickup bad habits like that by watching the way others write. Though I do have to wonder if the Docker team would have used that term were it not already a registered trademark. I suppose it does sound a little silly.
  - n42 5y ago
    that's not your bad habit, that's just how language evolves naturally. like I said, a pet peeve. the part that makes me twitch is that the evolution of the term is happening in a hobbyist community, where I've never heard a professional use the term. when I read it it doesn't make linguistic since to me -- a "Docker" is not a thing, what is its plural? anyway, you do you.

elliotpage 5y ago

I've used UnRAID for just over two years and it works a treat. Well worth the cost of entry.

4kelly 5y ago

+1 for unraid. I’ve been using it for about 4 years. IMO it’s usecase sits in between synology and a completely self administered server. I found synology features great, but was frustrated about the hardware lock in. I also didn’t want to spend too much time tinkering with a bare bones server. Enter unraid. I use it as a backup server, fileshare, time machine backup. As well as plex and other popular self hosted docker images.

Sparkle-san 5y ago

Unraid is interesting. I considered it years ago but didn't want to spend the money at the time so I went with OpenMediaVault. But at this point, I just run snapraid + UnionFS.

francislavoie 5y ago

My biggest annoyance is that they don't provide users a first-party way to run their own containers from a source Dockerfile. As a maintainer of an open source project, this is incredibly annoying because our plugin system is build/compile-time, and many users need to use certain plugins. They also flip the order of Docker port mappings, where `-v "8080:80"` would become "80 <- 8080" or w/e in their UI. And a bunch of other idiosyncrasies with configuring containers. And yeah, as others have said, "dockers" terminology hurts me deeply.

hanklazard 5y ago
The port mapping flip in the UI is seriously baffling. Not even that it happened but that it continues to be case. I feel that overall my unraid experience has been good and they certainly make the implementation of some basic services and plug-ins really easy. However I do find myself looking at more fully manual, open-source “home server” solutions and wonder if it would be worth a switch …

jpgvm 5y ago

Tried it. Decided for my needs that my Arch + ZFS based NAS is still the way to go. At the end of the day it's critical data for me that while backed up to tarsnap would take a very long time to restore. By just using ZFS and having regular scrubs etc scheduled properly I have very high confidence my array will always be online when I need it. I could probably build a similar level of trust in another product but ZFS (Under OpenSolaris, then Illumos, then FreeBSD and finally Linux - all the same pool btw!) has earnt my trust over many years.

mise_en_place 5y ago

I was using it as a headless KVM server but the PHP panel is rather buggy. Starting a VM doesn’t always kick it off, and had numerous issues with updating. It just lacks the polish of a commercial product.

Cyph0n 5y ago

I’ve heard great things about Unraid, but ended up choosing Proxmox to manage my home server. I am fairly tech savvy and don’t need anything “complicated”, so Proxmox works perfectly for me. But I’d love to hear any thoughts from others who have tried using both!

pocketsand 5y ago
Agree. I went to Proxmox and virtualize TrueNAS. Best of both worlds IMO and not at all any more difficult to manage.
- nuker 5y ago
  Why not just TrueNAS?
  - pocketsand 5y ago
    Virtualization on TrueNAS/BSD leaves a lot to be desired and in my experience just wasn't nearly as mature as on Linux with KVM/qemu, etc. Likewise, BSD jails seemed to me to be really well thought out, but when it came to getting them to work for me to run little apps/services like I could with Docker, or even a full-fat VM, I quickly gave up because the juice didn't seem worth the squeeze. Whereas on Proxmox it's a cinch for me to run like 20 different VMs/linux containers that I use for various projects/jobs/etc. Huge ecosystem and really easy to take advantage of massive community of linux/Debian users/Docker/etc. TrueNAS Scale, which is based on Debian, I think reflects an acknowledgement of the pain points of working around BSD for the types of services a lot of people want to use their NAS for. I don't think I'm ready to switch yet, but maybe in a year or two it will be a great solution.
    - xoa 5y ago
      Don't disagree with you that using TrueNAS Core as a general server/VM platform (some other things as well) has pain points. Some of which are BSDisms, some just as you say due to the plain fact that the community is vastly smaller. Even simple stuff like ports frequently being a bit out of date, or lacking the diversity you'd find elsewhere. Nothing that can't be worked around, but always some extra time on a whole different thing which in more popular environments (be it Proxmox/KVM/ESXi or whatever) would just be there and then get out of your way. That said I do think though a NAS is one of the things, even in a lot of homelab environments, that's actually worth its own hardware separate from the VM if one can swing the extra cost & space. I virtualized NAS for a while too but since I wanted to run VMs themselves off the NAS as well as a lot of other stuff, have a good backup/restore story etc, I found it started to get unpleasantly circular in terms of bootstrapping from a cold start or restore. Also, the hardware requirements for a good NAS are fairly distinct from a lot of what I wanted for virtualizing. It's not impossible to cram lots of hot swap drives and full size PCIe cards including GPUs for passthrough and tons of CPU and tons of RAM into a single 4U by any means, but splitting things out made it a lot simpler to optimize each side better. The NAS could be smaller, cooler, quieter and good at its own thing. After all-in-one I ended up with 3 distinct boxes: router/gateway (OPNsense), VM system, and NAS system. I know others have gone totally different directions, from AIO boxes to wild K8s clusters doing it all, but I feel like those provide a decent balance of flexibility and stability/isolation, I can mess with stuff and feel confidence in basic network connectivity or storage. Isolation also means not feeling quite the same pressure if one platform isn't as good at something as another, so long as it's good at its own specialty. >TrueNAS Scale, which is based on Debian, I think reflects an acknowledgement of the pain points of working around BSD for the types of services a lot of people want to use their NAS for. I'm a bit bummed philosophically there. I've used BSDs for a very long time, like much of the philosophy if not all the warts, and fundamentally losing diversity in software platforms even if open source is concerning. At the same time it's hard to get around the raw power of network effects in tech, and Linux has a ton of resources and eyes thrown at it at this point. I have no plans or interest in moving in the near future either, but it's hard not to feel like the headwinds are building a bit for TrueNAS Core. Though FreeBSD continues to put out excellent releases, and it's gotten this far. I've found myself on the underdog "but I think it's technically better!" losing side of a lot of tech in my life though :). It's always a balancing act in how much it's worth working on a tool itself vs using the tool to do other work.

flatiron 5y ago

I got lazy in my old years. I just use rclone and google drive.

hnaccount141 5y ago

I've been using Unraid for a few years now and while it's served me well I hesitate to recommend it. Were I to start over today I'd definitely be looking at TrueNAS Scale or rolling my own. Unraid seems to be targeting a rather niche market of people who are used to building PCs for running Windows and would like to have a home server and self host some apps (usually Plex and the 'arr stack if we're being honest). It does a good job of making all this accessible via a nice web UI with basic hypervisor and container management features. The app store they have for Docker containers is great for exposing new users to what's out there. The problem I've found is that while it does a good job of offering a low barrier to entry, the ceiling is quite low as well. It seems to me that the type of user they're trying to attract is also the type who would want to learn more and tinker, at which point Unraid's limitations will start to chafe. If you've used other Linux distros you'll find the lack of a package manager and other atypical features frustrating. Once you want to go beyond their app store for containers the web UI becomes limiting. There's no first-party docker compose support. The hypervisor UI is quite limited as well, lacking even the ability to create and manage snapshots. Of course you can manage all this from the command line, but at that point you may as well use another OS with a more performant and reliable filesystem. There are also some bizarre security choices that they've seemed to have had difficulty moving past. The web UI is only accessible as root, for example.

tylergetsay 5y ago
In the same boat, I recently switched to running a VM on top of unRAID and treating that as my app server and unRAID as a software raid host, it feels safer than rolling my own
syshum 5y ago
Depends on your use case for me I use Unraid for my "production" home storage for 3 main reasons 1. It is easy to administer I dont want to have screw with it when I just want to watch a movie from my emby server, or get some file I am working on 2. It allows me to disparate disk sizes, and expand the storage at will. Something TrueNAS and other ZFS based system struggle with 3. The Docker interface is the easiest I have ever found I want the "one click" service experience for my home services server. I do not want a package manager, or to ssh in to the server and start doing things. That said i also run 2 other Storage servers that are TrueNAS, I use them for backups, and doing the things you talk about. However with TrueNAS I have to plan out my Storage like I would my enterprise arrays, a 5 year storage plan, and preallocate the space when I build the array, because expanding it after the fact is a pain in the a*. (an no I am not going to keep adding mirror pair vdev's) That is the key here, use the correct tool for the job, and for a production server to run "home services" like emby, plex, gitea, paperless, SAMBA shares, Home Assistant, etc nothing IMO beats unraid, not even TrueNAS

recov 5y ago

Slightly on topic, a nice low maintence (other than a daily/weekly backup/scrub script) option without the need for a specific OS is mergerFS, combined with snapRaid. The main benefit is you can add and remove drives/directories willy-nilly. It's been stable for me for the past 3 years, it just works. https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs https://github.com/amadvance/snapraid/ https://github.com/amadvance/snapraid/

unixhero 5y ago

I just use Proxmox and ZFS on an honest to god X86 box.

vdfs 5y ago
Proxmox is better for running VMs and LXC containers, You can run TrueNAS or unRaid on top of it with disks passthrou

Ir0nMan 5y ago

I have been an UNRAID user for years now and I have been very satisfied with he product.

aborsy 5y ago

What does Unraid offer over Xpenology? Synology is perfect as a NAS. If you want NAS+ general server, you are better off separating the two.

justinsaccount 5y ago
Despite what you might read online, Xpenology is illegal pirated software. Last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621753
- generalizations 5y ago
  That link didn't seem very conclusive. What license is Synology distributed under? Only one I found was the GPL3.
  - justinsaccount 5y ago
    It's proprietary software. They release the source for any of the licensed components that they use that require source to be made available. Just like Apple does for OS X at https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ The fact that such downloads exist does not mean that the synology software is open source. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or misinformed.

Havoc 5y ago

I suspect in the long run truenas scale is going to eat their lunch. Regardless, many seem happy with unraid so glad it exists

fomine3 5y ago

Unraid looked like hobby when I looked in 2019. IIRC they don't require me to set root password but enabled WebUI by default. SSD "cache" solution was made by moving files by cron, but it seemed that they don't care race condition.

boxingrock 5y ago

closing in on 10 years with unraid, here's a few key points: - trades more raw storage for slower performance, only one parity drive is needed - if two drives die, you can still recover the rest of the data, no special recovery software needed - allows you to mix drive brands, sizes, smr, cmr, etc, etc... - allows you to expand one drive at a time, buy whatever is on sale when you need it - drives spin down when not in use, saving on power and replacements if you got a ton of media, it's pretty solid tech. the one thing i'd like to see is an "unraid lite", a headless solution with a cheap yearly fee. something to keep generating income for the team while allowing the vets more flexibility. because at the 10 year mark, it'll have worked out to $15/year for me and since i'll be virtualizing it again, i only really need security updates for kernel, ssh and samba.

SxC97 5y ago

I have a real split opinion on Unraid. On the one hand, It's probably one of the most versatile pieces of software that I've ever used. I use it in "production" at home and its filling half a dozen use cases for me. The first strength is VM support. I have ~25 VMs configured as I'm in grad school and it seems like every professor has a specific OS they want you to use. I use a MacBook at home and most professors require you to download and run a different Linux distro, or they just assume you have a windows PC handy. This wasn't a problem when I was going to school in person where I has access to a computer lab, but it is a problem as a mac user at home. Fedora, Ubuntu, Kali, and Windows 10. This was the OS requirement for just one semester of Advanced Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, and Network Security classes and running multiple VMs on my old laptop at the time was very taxing. The other beautiful thing about Unraid is how easy it is to pass through a GPU compared to other NAS distros. I have a windows VM configured with a GPU passed through that I use for gaming and the occasional CAD work (for fun). Before Unraid, I tried Proxmox, but after a month of work, I wasn't able to get GPU passthrough to work and the community wasn't any help. On unraid, it took maybe 3 days with plenty of help from the community. I also plan on running a Home Assistant VM if I ever get more into smart home stuff and move away from Homekit. I also have 100+ docker containers configured. Many of them are based on a home media streaming stack. *arr stack, ombi, jellyfin for movies and tv. Komga, calibre, and mylar for ebooks and comics. Podgrab and airsonic for podcasts. Jdownloader and deluge for everything else. The rest are small apps used for learning or just self hosting some apps. Things like Nextcloud, Paperless, rss, pihole, and a minecraft server. I had a data scare a couple years ago where I had written some journal entries in an app in college and the app had gone subscription and locked my access to my entries behind a pay wall. Ever since then, I use plain text and self hosted apps for everything important. I looked at other solutions for home server operating systems but many of them ran freeBSD, and while this did add ZFS support, it came at the cost of using jails instead of docker and at the time I knew that the apps I wanted to use had docker support, but I wasn't sure if they had decent jail support. The last selling point is the NAS features. I started with just a 1tb m.2 ssd to run a virtualization server and I was able to quickly add capacity via HDDs without screwing up my config. It started with just a small movie collection and quickly spiraled out to downloading every console game made between 1976 and 2007 so I could emulate them from any client device with almost no local storage. While the features of ZFS are great, I wouldn't want to give up the flexibility of adding one disk at a time. Also the easy to use wireguard UI was a big selling point. I found it much easier to use than configuring it via the terminal for some reason. On the other hand, it is also one of the buggiest pieces of software that I have ever willingly paid money for. The community support is great and a lot of the development is guided by community involvement, but as I get more familiar with homelabbing, I can feel the rough edges. I regularly have disks just drop out of the array and when looking online, it looks like this is a well known issue. I found community posts from _years_ ago saying that all you have to do is stop the array, remove the disk, start the array, then stop it again and re-add the disk and wait ~24hr for a parity check to run. This has been a known issue for years and it's still not fixed. Also if you don't have enough ram in the system and start a vm, the whole system just crashes and drops a random disk before making the web-ui unresponsive. Another known issue that hasn't been fixed. The VM configs also breaks sometimes for no reason. I had a bugged vm template that just froze the entire system the second I started it. No indication of what happened, just had to destroy the vm and delete the template via ssh before making a new one. The lack of docker-compose support is also frustrating. The terminal experience is also anemic. No package manager installed by default and many other normal system utilities are not pre-installed. This makes working on the system via ssh very frustrating. I've also lost some data because while Unraid is good at _adding_ disks, it's still terrible at _replacing_ disks. Just swapping out 2 HDDs in the array and 2 SSDs in the cache pool took weeks and the process was nerve racking due to the aforementioned disk dropping issue. I also ended up corrupting some data on some drives. I don't know how bad the damage is, but I know that some docker containers don't work anymore and my windows vm had to be completely reconfigured from scratch. I haven't even tried running some of the Linux distros I have configured but I don't have high hopes after the Windows debacle. I imagine that the coming ZFS support with RAIDz expansion will alleviate some of these pain points (like the missing snapshots feature), but I still feel like Unraid need to stop adding new features for a year and spend a year coming out with a "Snow Leopard" release. Just something that focuses on basic system stability and usability. Ultimately, I think I would recommend Unraid to a very small niche of people. If you are just getting started with homelabbing and want a flexable, scalable system, go with Unraid. If you care about stability, have the money to bulk buy drives, and don't mind a little more fiddling, I would probably recommend 2 systems. Something like truenas scale on a box for NAS stuff and something like a Proxmox box for VMs. EDIT: Speaking of Snow Leopard! I forgot to mention one of my most annoying bugs. I wanted to set up a time machine share on the array to back up my MacBook and it seems like time machine support has been broken for years despite this being an advertised feature! I feel like they should either fix the issue or remove support all together, anything in between is just frustrating. Instead I have to use chronosync and just manually copy files over to an array share but it's not quite as seamless as using the built in time machine feature.

zeagle 5y ago

I went with zfs on Debian over unraid, freenas, or omv for my current server. This way I have full control and updates for the system with out nasty surprises later that they changed some standard way of running a service or library. I've used QNAP with optware/entware then lenovoemc and never again. It's a lot easier to learn to set up smbd, NFS, nginx than deal with kludged together solutions later.

joshbaptiste 5y ago
I followed the plex media server model given here.. https://perfectmediaserver.com/tech-stack/snapraid.html https://perfectmediaserver.com/tech-stack/snapraid.html MergeFS over XFS volumes and SnapRaid for redundancy

vanillax 5y ago

Unraid is frustrating. Its good at making a dead simple nas and offers enough customizations with the "community apps" that you are stepping into the world of mixing NAS with a linux server. No docker compose support is maddening. Using the UI to customize docker apps absolutely blows. Every thing that you should be able to do requires 3rd party plugins. Ie you "can" do docker compose with a 3rd party plugin. You "can" do zfs if you get a third party plugin. You "can" mount drives outside the array with a plugin. I gave up after the RC update bricked my flashdrive and support told me well your flash drive was just bad and well its your fault you didnt backup. Im now on Proxmox + ZFS + VMs and I couldnt be happier.

denkmoon 5y ago

TrueNAS is the software you are looking for.

alexjplant 5y ago

The first and last time I heard anything about unRaid before now was almost 15 years ago. I ran a home RAID server a few years back and just used CentOS in conjunction with mdraid and Webmin without a second thought. Given all of the limitations people are mentioning in this thread I fail to see what unRaid's value add is over a solution like mine for anybody with more than a modicum of Linux expertise.

vermaden 5y ago

With ZFS you can just partition larger and smaller disks to fir your needs. Lets assume you have 3 disks: - 10 TB - 5 TB - 8 TB Here is how you would partition them: disk A - 10 TB <_ZFS RAIDZ - disk 1/3 - 5 TB SIZE_> | <_ZFS MIRROR - disk 1/2 - 3 TB SIZE_> | <_ZFS STRIPE - disk 1/1 - 2 TB SIZE_> disk B - 5 TB <_ZFS RAIDZ - disk 2/3 - 5 TB SIZE_> disk C - 8 TB <_ZFS RAIDZ - disk 3/3 - 5 TB SIZE_> | <_ZFS MIRROR - disk 2/2 - 3 TB SIZE_> This way you can create three separate pools: 5 TB each disk ZFS RAIDZ = 10 TB effective space with redundantion 3 TB each disk ZFS MIRROR = 3 TB effective space with redundantion 2 TB single disk ZFS STRIPE = 2 TB effective space without redundantion You can of course 'connect' the two redundant ZFS pools into one with these commands below on creation. This is a test that I just did on FreeBSD but with GB units instead of TB as with real disks: # truncate -s 10G disk10 # truncate -s 5G disk5 # truncate -s 8G disk8 # mdconfig.sh -c disk10 IN: created vnode at /dev/md0 # mdconfig.sh -c disk5 IN: created vnode at /dev/md1 # mdconfig.sh -c disk8 IN: created vnode at /dev/md2 # gpart create -s GPT md0 md0 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 5g md0 md0p1 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 3g md0 md0p2 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs md0 md0p3 added # gpart create -s GPT md1 md1 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs md1 md1p1 added # gpart create -s GPT md2 md2 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 5g md2 md2p1 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs md2 md2p2 added # zpool create HYBRID raidz /dev/md0p1 /dev/md1p1 /dev/md2p1 mirror /dev/md0p2 /dev/md2p2 # zpool create NONRED /dev/md0p3 # zpool list HYBRID NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT HYBRID 17.2G 161K 17.2G - - 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE - # zfs list HYBRID NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT HYBRID 126K 12.0G 27.3K /HYBRID # zpool status HYBRID pool: HYBRID state: ONLINE config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM HYBRID ONLINE 0 0 0 raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 md0p1 ONLINE 0 0 0 md1p1 ONLINE 0 0 0 md2p1 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 md0p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 md2p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors # zpool list NONRED NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT NONRED 1.88G 108K 1.87G - - 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE - # zfs list NONRED NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT NONRED 108K 1.75G 24K /NONRED # zpool status NONRED pool: NONRED state: ONLINE config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM NONRED ONLINE 0 0 0 md0p3 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors This means that instead of that 12 GB space on real 10/8/5 TB disks you would get 12 TB of redundant space and 2 TB of non-redundant space. Instructions for real SATA disks on FreeBSD: # gpart create -s GPT ada0 ada0 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 5t ada0 ada0p1 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 3t ada0 ada0p2 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs ada0 ada0p3 added # gpart create -s GPT ada1 ada1 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs ada1 ada1p1 added # gpart create -s GPT ada2 ada2 created # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 5t ada2 ada2p1 added # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs ada2 ada2p2 added # zpool create HYBRID raidz /dev/ada0p1 /dev/ada1p1 /dev/ada2p1 mirror /dev/ada0p2 /dev/ada2p2 You can also create two separate ZFS pools like that: # zpool create RAID5 raidz /dev/ada0p1 /dev/ada1p1 /dev/ada2p1 # zpool create MIRRORED mirror /dev/ada0p2 /dev/ada2p2 The mdconfig.sh script is here: - https://github.com/vermaden/scripts/blob/master/mdconfig.sh https://github.com/vermaden/scripts/blob/master/mdconfig.sh Hope that helps. After all the 'stable' years with ZFS/OpenZFS I would just not trust 'some new hybrid RAID' implementation ... not to mention all the ZFS features like compression/deduplication/snapshots/clones/copies/bookmarks/send/recv/... Regards.

yboris 5y ago

I'm a big fan of DrivePool (by StableBit) for Windows. You can add as many hard drives as you want and pool them together into one, optionally add duplication, and if anything fails, each hard drive is just an NTFS volume that can be accessed with any other computer. https://stablebit.com/ https://stablebit.com/