I’ve been running Unraid OS as my house’s media server for a few years now. Overall, I’ve been very pleased with it, particuarly with how well it handles old and mismatched hardware. While Unraid may not offer the pure disk performance of it’s primary competitor TrueNAS, I’ve found Unraid’s performance more than sufficient for home use. As well, deploying applications for home use is simple with Unraid, while TrueNAS took a complicated “enterprise” approach to application deployment.
The hard-drive storage of my Unraid server has been rock solid. I haven’t lost any data which is the most important feature of such a network storage system. That said, I have had repeated failures of the USB sticks that Unraid requires to boot. In practice, it seems most USB thumb drives are shit, particularly if they sit 24/7 in the heat put out by my server.
So far, I’ve had 3 different thumb drives fail. Often I find out when I try to upgrade my server OS, only to receive an error that the update could not be written to the USB stick before reboot. When this happens, I have buy another USB-2 drive, 32 GB or smaller, as that is the recommendation from Unraid. Then I start to follow the instructions for replacing the drive. This process is somewhat error-prone and requires that exactly the correct backups have been taken.
Recovering from an Unraid thumb drive failure, in my experience, require the following backups to have been taken BEFORE the failure:
Changing to a new bootable thumb drive, requires migrating the Unraid license. A fairly straight-forward process, it is still a hassle given how often I have had to do tihs, nearly once a year now I believe.
With all the backups in place, recovering a working Unraid system after a thumb drive is not too bad. I am still a happy user of this network storage OS. However, my experience demonstrates the importance of having all backups in place before they are needed. Rebuilding an Unraid system from scratch, with all the configuration and tweaking required, would not be a pleasant experience.