It’s proprietary, after all. I understand paid is fine, but even then, it usually better be open source.
So, why is Unraid an exception ?
Thanks
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Because it’s easy and does all the hard stuff out of the box? Also any sized drives!
I think because it’s got a black background in the UI and it makes people feel like hackers. OpenMediaVault’s choice of white and light blue is way less 1337.
Has a nice UI, let’s me mix and match disks, let’s me host docker containers plus a VM with gpu pass through.
All basically out of the box. (Ok - Pass through was a bastard) All for a one off price.
I don’t know if there are other options that let me do all of that, unraid has always been the one mentioned.
Mixing disks is the #1 reason I went with unraid over any other option.
Pass through is always a bastard.
It just needed the AMD compatibility plugin, lots of time wasted until someone pointed that out though.
To note, unless you buy the most expensive tier it’s no longer a one time purchase.
Good point. I got 1 year of ultimate, with the plan to upgrade to perpetual if it was good (it is!).
The cost of that is still less than the cost would have been to buy new matching drives.
Even in the open source community, the libre-ness of a product is just one of many factors. The fitness for a purpose, the initial difficulty of the setup, the continuous difficulty of operation and maintenance, the pace of development (if applicable), the professional or community support structure, the projected longevity of the product or service, and the general insanity of the people involved are all important factors that can, and often do outweigh the importance of open software.
If I’ve learned anything in the 30 odd years homelabing and running a SaaS application, it’s that you need to learn the basics of the command line. That will help you master running anything on a nix server.
But must new homelabers are only able to use a gui, so unraid is the best way to get into running stuff with the least effort.
I keep thinking a homelab 101 course would help those new to homelabing get going without a gui.
Oh hi I picked up Linux for the CLI and shell and the UI for me has nothing to do with it.
There is no easy way to break into the scene and unraid is a one stop shop. So you want to set up a few little projects on your own? It’s learning containerization, learning networking and NAT, figuring out filesystems (and shares and share locations) and backup strategies, how to integrate with VPN, deployment strategies and templates (think Ansible, docker compose, make scripts, etc). There’s a shitload to know and not a “for dummies” place to learn it.
Taking the “easy” first project of ARR suite + jackett, integrate with transmission, and integrate with jellyfin or Plex. This is not a couple hours of work if you’ve never done it before. With unraid it’s probably one video tutorial and less than an hour? Idk I haven’t done that one yet. But it’s a common request.
There are a lot of things that need to hang together for a good homelab to work, and unraid for me has made it so I don’t have to spend all my time doing plumbing and background work to try a project and see if I even want to use it.
I would absolutely do a 101 on self hosting, but it seems everybody has different priorities on what to host and how so it’s probably not cut and dry to implement.
For me, it was the parity system and the fact that i could mix different disk sizes and the vm + graphic card pass-through setup. Unraid helped me to start in this world.
Years later, after gaining experience on all of that and investing in dedicated pcie card and disks, I’ve moved to truenas my data and containers.
Still using unraid for the vm part. But i plan to migrate to truenas too at some point.
Unraid is easy to start with when you have no idea what you’re doing. Other stuff often requires more up front work to setup.
The paid licence is just the cost of the conveniences.
Is it much easier than TrueNAS?
I went with TrueNAS because it’s open-source, and it’s been smooth sailing.
(I just use it as a NAS, nothing more)
Couldn’t say, for me it was way way easier than ESXI which was my first break into the space. And also more complete / straightforward than bare metal which was what I had been doing before unraid.
I paid for the lifetime license. No regrets.
Some don’t care much about the license. Like how many people run Xpenology (hacked synology dsm) or Plex or stuff like that.
For me, it was initially a jumping off point because I was more comfortable with GUIs. Now it’s a matter of convenience. I’m much better than I was with CLI, docker, etc, but I find unraid makes management easier. Proprietary doesn’t necessarily equal bad. Since it’s built on top of open source, you can pivot if they start pulling stupid shit.
It is? Where? Please don’t say Reddit as that is full of advertisement bots pretending to be regular users.
I am more surprised by how popular Proxmox seems to be here, which is really just adding a lot of unnecessary complexity, but I guess the GUI comments others here shared applies to it as well.
I am more surprised by how popular Proxmox seems to be here, which is really just adding a lot of unnecessary complexity
I switched to Proxmox for one reason: PBS. As far as I know there is no match with plain KVM. Proxmox also makes setting up and maintaining a high-availability setup very easy, which is a nice bonus.
In this very community, I’ve seen plenty of Unraid posts, as much as I do on Reddit.
I think it’s neat. It has tons guides and plugins to do pretty much anything. Other solutions can be lacking in documentation. One big plus is the way you can just throw in whatever drives you’ve got laying around and not have to worry about them matching or anything. Is it the best performing? Probably not but it doesn’t need to be. For me it just hosts files and a bunch of fairly lightweight services.
If I had to guess, never having used it myself, is that it has a decent UI that simplifies sometimes complicated operations and it has been around seemingly forever.
Because it is beginner friendly and it has a lifetime license I guess and it is not yet enshittified.
I just tinkered a bit with zimaos and I was pretty impressed. if it keeps getting updated I can see unraid getting a serious competitor. but yes the question still stands why there isn’t something similar beginner friendly in the opensource space.
