I have a couple of home server, both with Proxmox as hypervisor, one VM with Ubuntu 22.04 that does just Docker containers, one with Open Media Vault, one with Home Assistant (HA OS) and a couple of Windows VM to do some tests. Since I wanted to move from OMV, right now I see 2 options:

  • stay with Proxmox and find another NAS OS
  • use Unraid as NAS and hypervisor

What other option would you suggest?

  • @tiramichu@lemm.eeEnglish
    9•9 months ago

    The clue with Unraid is in the name. The goal was all about having a fileserver with many of the benefits of RAID, but without actually using RAID.

    For this purpose, Fuse is a virtual filesystem which brings together files from multiple physical disks into a single view.

    Each disk in an Unraid system just uses a normal single-disk filesystem on the disk itself, and Unraid distributes new files to whichever disk has space, yet to the user they are presented as a single volume (you can also see raw disk contents and manually move data between disks if you want to - the fused view and raw views are just different mounts in the filesystem)

    This is how Unraid allows for easily adding new drives of any size without a rebuild, but still allows for failure of a single disk by having a parity disk - as long as the parity is at least as large as the biggest data disk.

    Unraid have also now added ZFS zpool capability and as a user you have the choice over which sort of array you want - Unraid or ZFS.

    Unraid is absolutely not targeted at enterprise where a full RAID makes more sense. It’s targeted at home-lab type users, where the ease of operation and ability to expand over time are selling points.

    • @papertowels@lemmy.oneEnglish
      4•9 months ago

      Not sure if it’s obvious from this comment, but also worth pointing out to folks learning about unraid that it still has parity drives that let you recover from disk failures - it’s not just JBOD.