After releasing this video I quickly realized what these types of video do, they divide people and that was not my intention. I went into this naively thinking that it would bring people together. I did spend a lot of time researching, testing, and putting this video together and didn't know where it was going to take me. For those that don't agree with me, or other comments, that's actually great! I ALWAYS want to hear other opinions and I welcome those that differ from mine! New ideas and different opinions not only make me a better homelabber, but a better person so thank you!
As a long term unraid user, I think it was pretty fair. The subscription model annoys a lot of people and unraid does have some “essentials” that aren’t provided out of the box leaning on plugins and people to self learn. On the flip side it has a great community, and good customer service if you ever need help. At the end of the day though if you want a NAS where you can grow the array by just throwing new disks in every few years, it’s the only solution and a great one. If you don’t want a paid license and are happy with buying all your discs up front truenas fits better. It’s great we have options in the homelab space!
You're doing great job and it's very informative to soak the experiences from someone like you! I wouldn't call a discussions below something that "divides" - just different observations and experiences shared by some storage nerds community. Thanks to that we have whole picture - yours and users.
Overall I think it’s a goid video but the main issue is that from a Unraid user perspective this seems a bit unfair (at least to me) You should have really looked into the forums and the community in general at Unraid and especially the Support threads for Plugins and containers or even Discord. Everything is there including tutorials. Your issue with HW transcoding would be solved in
I think this video presents a valid point about the state of Unraid today, which is that a lot of features one would expect to be out of the box is actually quite reliant on community developers and plug-ins; things like historical and granular reporting, native backups and snapshots, and a cohesive design language. Watching a new user's experience without all the bells and whistles of the quality of life plugins I've accumulated over the years and I can see where a new user today might be left feeling a bit wanting. As a user of Unraid for over 8 years, I've loved the simplicity and easy learning curve when it comes to the OS, especially from a non-enterprise background. It's taught me a lot about linux, containers, vms, networking, everything in between. Seeing some of these features in TrueNas definitely made me wish it was also natively part of Unraid.
I use both. One of the key benefits of Unraid is partial survivability past the n+x limit, the ability to use simple data recovery methods on any single failed drive, and even the ability to force recovery of in a greater than n+x situation where a portion of the data on the loss plus 1 drive is partially accessible. Oh and you can also create ZFS pools in Unraid.
Translation For the non-techies: In RAID5 (which is the most common for homelab RAIDs, where you "loose" one drive of capacity, so 1+1+1+1 = 3), if one drive fails - you are ok. Replace that drive and everything is back to working like before. In RAID6 (where you "loose" two drives of capacity, so 1+1+1+1 = 2) it is even ok if two disks fail. Replace both and everything is back to working. However: If even a single drive more than allowed fails (so two defects in RAID5 or three in RAID6) then you loose everything. In Unraid it is up to you if you add zero, one or two "parity" drives. Most users will go with one. Each disk will add a redundancy safety net. As long as you have at least as many parity drives as the number of disks that fail you will not loose any data (just like a RAID system). Replace the disks and it will continue to work. And then there is the difference to RAID: If more drives fail than you have parity drives, then you will only loose the data that is stored on the failed drives. All the rest of your data that is stored on disks that still work is still unharmed and can be accessed.
Yup. I use TrueNAS for my cold(er) storage - its ZFS interface is much easier. That's where all my local backups go. I use Unraid for the actual live storage, and running all the "fun" stuff (media, game servers, etc...).
WARNING : TrueNas dropped kubernetes support in favor of Docker compose in the next version. This caused TrueCharts to completely drop support of TrueNas SCALE, even on the current version. This has leaved me in a state where I cannot install new apps or upgrade existing ones, despite still being on a version of TrueNas that should still support it.
I can understand frustration finding out that a feature you frequently use suddenly stopped working, but in a wider context switching from Kubernetes to Docker Compose is a great move people ware waiting for. You can ditch TrueChart and their outdated apps and use a power of Docker and awesome Docker Compose configs. Many people, including myself, had to do workarounds to use our beloved Docker Compose. Not any more!
I think it really depends on your use case and what you expect. One thing I'm looking into for my next NAS with UnRaid is single drive use and spindown. Because ZFS or any raid system, when you need one file, the whole raid is used so it's heat, noise and power usage. Since UnRaid is basically disk stripping with extra steps, only the disk that contains the file is used. So if like me your NAS is for storage with single files access and you don't have a need for more than single drive perf then UnRAID looks like a valid choice for my use case. Otherwise I would go with TrueNAS any other day (as I already have)
The Unraid array isn't striped - which is why it can spin up/down single disks. The disks are only virtually concatenated. But otherwise, yes I agree with your points, which is why I've been running Unraid for 6+ years and why I'll continue to use it for NAS. My largest portioned pool is going to be ZFS going forward however, even with its requirements of all-or-none spin. It's not a big deal when you set your timeout period reasonably.
I think that one of the great advantages that Unraid has over any other NAS OS is the shallow learning curve. This lets less sophisticated users, like me, install their own home lab and have the full range of use of all the features available to more pro users. Like Docker containers, VMs and hosting your own services like Immich and Nextcloud. I played with Freenas and then Truenas for a bit and I barely got it to run let alone deploy a container. Now that my Unraid server is running like it should, I have had the opportunity to learn Docker and how to use a Linux console a nice introduction, in my opinion, to more advanced knowledge.
This is something most people like to forget. Unraid compared to proxmox, truenas, and others is so much simpler to understand, to navigate, and to get going out of the box. I know most people who watch this kind of content are already wizards at this stuff, but not everyone wants to be a Linux grand master - they want an easy operating system to back up some files and call it a day.
Also you should not underestimate the community. I use Unraid since 2019 and 90% of the problems and challenges I had were either covered on their Forum or you can find a guide on TH-cam. I doubt there is a person who uses Unraid who at some point didn't watch "Spaceinvader One" videos or other guys like Ibracorp. It really made the learning curve much simpler at the start.
Really? I've worked in IT for nearly 20 years, went to college for electronics and computers, have been using a PC for about 40 years since I was a kid. Sure, most of my experience has been Windows and DOS before that, but I've worked with Linux and Mac too, I've even done programming in school (hated it, so I ended up in support). I can't stand the Unraid UI/UX, it's unintuitive, weird, and hard to mangae, things aren't straight forward. Why should I have to install an app (that is actually a desktop Linux GUI app) to brows the files from the WebUI, how stupid is that? Basic functionality was missing out of the box, had to install add ons. I would never have chosen Unraid myself. The choice of storing the OS drive on the USB instead of a HDD/SSD is short sighted to say the least. Relying on a USB stick for the OS drive is far from fault tolerant (ask me how I know!). Maybe it's my ADHD brain, maybe it's my Windows bias, but honestly, I doubt it.
You can take snapshots of appdata on Unraid if you create a cache pool using ZFS and keep appdata on that cache pool. There's also a Community Apps plug-in that will make scheduled cron jobs to backup appdata to a separate location.
As a user of both (and some qnaps aside), I have to defend Unraid just a little, as some of the cons are not really a cons: - Having system on small usb drive let's you save one drive which can be critical for some small home users. And the backup of it is set as default during the nightly backups. You can just use it to write a system to new one anytime you want without disk swaps - system on pendrive also allows you to easily move the system to, for example, vm in proxmox with just a small usb passthru - ISCSi exists and it's doing great job - For those who do not keep homelab in separate room, ZFS and constantly spinning drives can be annoying. Due to Unraid specific storage management, some of my disks are actually sleeping most of the time saving energy - it's much more small system friendly (RAM) - for years it was a perfect example of easiness in passthrough - just click the device and add. I have no clue what happened but also started to have issues with passing some gpus (nvidia)
@@Shadoweee Not really. Since Unraid is not raid, it will wake up only one drive to save the data to, not the whole array. Since putting disks to sleep and waking up constantly is never a good idea, add to this extra power consumption - those are not the same.
I had to migrate an Unraid system the other day, and I just moved the Unraid USB and the hard drives to the new system, and it just worked. I was against the Unraid USB method at first, but I really see its value now.
@@Shadoweee Nah, only having the option to install it on the usb drive is idiotic. the fact that you dont even have the option for redundancy. also license key tied to the thumb drive is also stupid, the fact that you have to wait 12 months or reach out to support to move the license. the functionality for the use case is good, but the fact that there is no alternative option sucks. also, saving 1 drive is mostly only useful because of their own licensing. No home users are going to run out of sata ports for an OS that costs 50$ at minimum, for a pc that only has 2-4 sata ports, users will use something else thats cheaper as cost is a factor. for ones that have more sata ports, 6-8+, users can use m.2 for boot drives and are not strapped for ports.
For what its worth, I currently have 3 Truenas Scale Machines and a few proxmox machines in my rack. All with different use cases. Now I'm new to the whole "homelab" thing and my background is in construction, but after probably about a week or so of videos from Level1Techs, Lawrence Systems, and you I had gotten pretty comfortable with it and now I would say I'm fairly good with the system. I figured that if I was going to get into something I might as well jump into the deep end and hopefully not have to relearn something else down the line and I couldn't be happier. Now I will admit that with my construction business I was able to "write off" almost all of the cost of the building of the machines because of "office upgrades" since I use them for backup of the business and to host software for managing my company, but as far as out of the box experience I don't think I made the wrong choice. Thanks for all the information you post! Your a real MVP.
I've been an unRAID user for several years now. The key is tied to your account and you have the option of doing a cloud backup of your flash drive. So really, you don't lose your config if the flash drive fails.
Ive been using unraid for many years. It still a great choice, but overall, if it was easier to switch my huge array I would probably migrate to truenas. Snapshots and the faster performance are the big ticket items that are tempting me.
Some of the items you mention seem like you didnt give UnRaid a fair shake. I'm backing up my VMs nightly and have hardware pass-through working without much fuss. That's not to say I'm all in on team UnRaid. Their new subscription model is a non-starter for me (if i hadn't already had a non-subscription license).
I tried to be as fair as possible and gave an in-depth explanation as to why and it's OK if you don't agree. VMs don't support snapshots and GPU passthrough has been harder than doing it on Proxmox, and that's 100% manual. These are two things I value, I totally understand if that's not what you value!
@@TechnoTimI mean, in 2024 we can't live without snpshot! Yes, backing UP is a thing, but snapshots are not backup. When you do a snapshot and just "try" something, the time you need to restore the previous state is virtually non-existent and you cannot say the same thing if you need to restore a backup, maybe trough a gigabit connection.
@TechnoTim I appreciate the video for sure. I have been using UnRaid for about 5 years now and at the time TrueNas was behind in some areas. Your review shows me that it's time to give TrueNas another try. I don't think you had any ill intent at all or intended bias. Don't let a healthy debate keep you from continuing with these types of videos.
It seems to me that you are not very familiar with Unraid. For storage you touched on the array setup but not pools. Lots of Unraid user run zpools on unraid and it supports snapshots the same as TrueNas. You also have the option of running a traditional Unraid array making Unraid the clear winner in storage to me. As far as applications templates are stored by the app store on Unraid. Appdata Backup allows you to backup your appdata either manually or on a schedule or if you run a zfs cache which I do you can also take snapshots of your datasets.
I have been using TrueNAS for the last 3 years and it has worked for me well. I was not a big fan of using a USB for my OS with Unraid. The issue that I currently have is that my apps will not utilize my GPU. I look for a solution on that right now. I have to say that Techno TIm is correctly you have select an OS that best fits you. I have recommend both OS to people.
I appreciate your honest explanations. I went trunas, but have friends who don't fiddle with their system nearly as much as I like to, and they swear by Unraid, cause for simple stuff its easy. They also wanted to make use of all the hard drives they have ever purchased regardless of age or size.
3:23 - What happens if my USB boot device fails? You can manually transfer your license to a new USB Flash device at any time up to once per year. After that, contact support. (Copied from unRAID web page)
@@fwiler I haven't used any of those Nas softwares yet, but I am currently deciding between all of them. I just wanted to point out an error in the video.
Kenel panic after power loss is a deal breaker for me, no fault tolerance. And saying "you should have a UPS" isn't an answer, you can have sudden power loss for a multitude of reasons even with a UPS (failed UPS server communication and batteries run out, accidentally pulling the USB stick, pulling the power cable accidentally, etc). If even MS-DOS could survive a sudden power loss when booted from a floppy disk, then Unraid should when booted from a USB stick. I've had to rebuild the USB stick too many times. I'm looking at TrueNAS as a replacement.
You can add iSCSI in UnRAID through a Plugin. You can also create ZFS arrays alongside the UnRAID array in UnRAID which makes it more flexible than TrueNAS. The downside is that the UnRAID ZFS array implementation doesn't have a nice GUI (yet) to manage snapshots and other aspects of the ZFS array. I like UnRAID for home use, however, I wouldn't use it for business use either.
Outside of the seething bias that the creator claims they don't have, despite the plethora of comments pointing it out, I'm glad that so many comments have corrected many of the issues with this comparison video and pointed out other flaws. As someone who is investigating moving from Windows Server to unRaid or TrueNAS, the comment section was very informative as I research what makes more sense in my use case.
Maybe you should take some energy measurements as well. I choose Unraid because of its ability to send harddrives individual to sleed whem the are not longer needed. Other than in a typically raid only the drive where the file i want needs to spin up. Every file will always stay on one harddrive. This is also the reason for many why they use a cpu with integrated gpu instead of a dedicated gpu. In a land like Germany energy costs are quite expensive and for that reason i choose Unraid.
This is such a great point. Why is this common knowledge among longtime users but not something that's in their product documentation? This is something they should really promote.
@@TechnoTim In the German community, there is a real competition to see who gets the most energy-efficient server put together. There are some hard-working people who measure the consumption of many motherboards, CPUs and power supplies. For example, servers that consume more than 30W in "Idel mode" (only the Unraid runs without active Docker and VM, as well as with disks in the spin-down) are already rated as poor. Really good is who makes it under the magic 10W.
@@Locationary You don't want drives constantly spinning up and down all the time, granted, but on my NAS I only use the backup volume 2 hours a day, the media volume maybe three times a week, so it's nuts to have 4 drives spinning away at 7200 rpm 24x7. If you can put 'always on' stuff on SSD you may be able to have the spinning rust powered down nearly all the time. That's not likely to be a problem.
@@paulwoodward8265 Unraid does this exact thing. If you configure it with one or more cache drives it will store files like vm disks, docker files and system data directly onto the cache drive therefore allowing the hard drives to spin down for very long periods of time if configured correctly. Great for power and noise concerns. Personally i think that's one of Unraid's party tricks along with the ability to throw random hard drives in so long as they aren't a bigger capacity than the parity drive.
Thank you for putting together this comparison! I never bothered to do the research or even try both out myself, so this is super useful (and saves me a ton of time). I build my NAS from scratch and it's running netatalk for macOS-native shares and Time Machine backups and NFS for more Linux-y shares on other machines in my homelab. Maybe running apps from the app stores is easier than setting it up and maintaining it myself, so I think I'll check out probably TrueNAS next.
re: price, for home use. If you have odd sized drives laying about, unraid might be cheaper than the drives you have to buy to make true nas work, or cheaper than the value of the storage you can't use because it doesn't fit in true nas' purist system.
(my spicy take: youtubers who get WD to send them a pile of enterptise HDD's don't get to complain about the price of unraid, without disclosing all the drives they can't use in true NAS...)
Cutting out plugins from Unraid severely limits the OS from a review perspective. Unraid’s ecosystem is very much a “here the base OS, add in anything you need” sort of mentality. You can easily grow your understanding of the OS with this approach. Learn about this thing called iSCSI? See if there’s a plugin for it, then check the community forum for how it works, how to set it up, etc. As for data integrity, I think a big miss is the value of the Unraid array. 2 dead disks in a raidz1 means FULL DATA LOSS, where your Unraid array will only lose the data in the borked disks. For a home user environment, that’s a HUGE win in my book. Enterprise is different. They have offsite/tape backups as standard practice, where a home user likely can’t afford full redundancy on a large NAS. Also: saying “I’m just talking the base OS, no add-ons or plugins”, but then mentions adding custom app feeds to TrueNAS feels a bit off. Overall, I think Tim needs some more time with the OS. Maybe a relook after “fixing” his issues with each OS via plugins, scripts, etc. and a little more time learning each system. Not knowing how to click the lock icon in Unraid to show the “X” to remove cards in the dashboard for example.
Click the green lock icon on the upper right of the stats page in unRAID to customize. Took me a while of digging for that one but it's pretty simple. I have been on the fence for a while, using UR at the moment but don't take advantage of the array. I have one parity and one drive to make UR happy then ZFS pools for the rest, probably going back to TNS now for the data integrity. Thanks for your efforts even though you are getting some flack from seasoned UR users, if you drove it for years like TN they still wouldn't be happy.
I still find it pretty clunky to have a USB stick dangling on the server. Can the image not be written to an internal drive or something? I really don't understand how can anyone think that a USB stick is a production ready device for storing a system as critical as NAS storage. Everything that depends on your NAS storage depends by extension on your USB stick. One unlucky bump during maintenance, one unlucky power surge, or whatever and there goes your boot drive, now you need to get a new one and flash it again, while everything you run depends on volatile memory
@@kolterdyxThey make tiny USB drives the size of wireless mice adapters, but yeah I agree. At least let me run them with redundancy or something. However, considering you need cache drives for unraid and likely 2 of them, that leaves ITX motherboard users without a place to install their OS.
@@kolterdyx The USB acts like a dongle as the license is bound to its ID - that is why - not saying I like it. But i. e. you could use emmc device like i.e. Linctstaion N1 does which isn't as prone to fail like USB sticks do. Unraid tries to alleviate the problem with backups of you stick to images or your account so you can recover them when needed in case of failure and these backup can be scheduled though an app.The USB acts like a dongle as the license is bound to its ID - that is why - not saying I like it. But i. e. you could use emmc device like i.e. Linctstaion N1 does which isn't as prone to fail like USB sticks do. Unraid tries to alleviate the problem with backups of you stick to images or your account so you can recover them when needed in case of failure and these backup can be scheduled though an app.
For me, TrueNAS. I don't need all the features TrueNAS provides so I run it in proxmox. I'm well aware that proxmox and do zfs out of the box, but I prefer using the features TrueNAS provides for monitoring my drives over proxmox's meager options.
While i appreciate the video and the comparison I did miss you talking about what unraid does better then truenas, for example I found it easier to use with more documentation. When in the installer its wayyy easier then what truenas has. It felt for me like this video was a pull towards truenas (as it won 99% of the comparisons you made). In the end you said that it depends on the use cases but what i missed in the video was what usecases unraid would be better for (as you only explained yours). Did appriciate the video, thanks and hope you do well and continue the amazing videos. Have a good one!
Appreciate the fair comparison for now and would love to see a follow up of your understanding and breakdown for Unraid after a longer time using it, maybe a few months or a full year with all the customizations and learnings from the active Unraid community and its constantly updating apps, etc.
Been running UNRAID since the Lime Tech days… for those that like to mix drive sizes and build as you go and don’t need high speed storage, it’s the way to go. Both OS have large support communities now, but years ago UNRAID had an edge there IMO. As you say at the end, both are good solutions depending on your use cases.
I agree with you as I have a mixed drive (60TB) setup and went to Unraid as Truenas can't handle this as my smallest drive is 6TB and the largest 18TB. Only to bad about the new subscription services. Tried Truenas first and was difficult to setup as a new novice user who has build his first nas, Unraid was running after a couple of minutes.
@@RichardErkens right. That's my takeaway... TrueNas is catching up to UnRaid and surpassing it in many ways. The biggest factor remains the matching drive requirement.
And here I am, running my NAS on some flavor of Debian with ZFS, SMB, NFS, and rsync for backups, all managed with Ansible. I may also run containers or VMs on that machine , but it's not in my NAS playbook, so that doesn't factor into it. My big problem with Unraid and True/FreeNAS is that they're trying to do too much non-NAS things. Store and share files, on a network, nothing more. Also, no Ansible, no dice.
Ah, it would've been awesome if you had power efficiency as a talking point. People like me choose Unraid just because of this reason alone, as Unraid supports true SSD caching when the disks are spun down. Running HDDs 24/7 is a waste of power and HDD-lifespan. Power efficiency makes a huge difference in Europe.
There actually are stats that would suggest that constantly spinning drives up and down shortens their lifespan vs just leaving them running. I assume it's because of the temperature cycling. But it definitely does make sense in places with expensive electricity or if you have many drives.
@@NickyNiclas Keep in mind, with a good unRAID setup with a decently sized cache you can have the disks powered off for days at a time. There is also a plugin to cache directories and files in memory so things like Plex wont wake your disks just to scan their contents. So we're not talking about spinning them down 24-48 times a day. For me only about half of my disks spin up a single time each day.
I use both. I started with Unraid for its storage flexibility in my first homelab NAS. I also like the VM ease of setup in Unraid better than TrueNAS. I use TrueNAS as my main archival file server because I love the data integrity features, it has more remote backup and cloud sync capabilities out of the box than Unraid does, and I built that machine new with far more capacity than I will need for a while because I had the budget to do so. I like the ease of using Docker containers on Unraid, and I do use Jails on TrueNAS Core. I haven't migrated to TrueNAS Scale yet but I probably will be doing so in the next few months. I can recommend either TrueNAS or Unraid to any new homelabber or just general computer enthusiast depending on what their needs, budget, and experience level are. Or I can direct them to just buy a Synology NAS if neither of these fits their use case.
One thing I like on the Licensing part of UnRaid is that is not bound to any Hardware (excluded the USB-Stick). Because you can change the Hardware (Mainboard, CPU, GPU and so on) completely wihtout a need of re-deploy the Container or VMs aslong you have the same drives (HDD/SSDs/Nvmes) installed the System boots and is running like before.
I agree. I've moved my two unRaid configurations on two USB disks between different hardware setups for 10+ years. Having to reregister each time would have been a pain. The only time the USB is used is on initial boot to load the OS into RAM so read/write cycles are very minimal. The only exception would be if you turn on logging to the usb drive but you really shouldn't do that except in very specific circumstances.
Love the video, i respect your opinion. I personally plan on using both, one is free the other is paid so i get both of best world without it being to much. I plan on using 2 QNAP D400S JBOD with 2 miniforum ms-01 machines. Being able to learn both and use both is in my opinion the ideal way. But that's also because energy is freaking cheap where i live so i don't think about how much i use or run really.
Plus there is an explanation option, both for the whole screen and if you click on any option in the UI. Not super obvious, but explains every single thing in Unraid. Super helpful for example if you are setting up shares.
Those are fair comparisons, but I'm very glad to be running unraid. A little bit of elbow grease can equalize several of these categories, but you need to go in with eyes wide open.
TrueNas and Unraid are used in two different ways. Personally I chose Unraid for ease up upgrade. As I got used to it, I found the opposite of your conclusions. TrueNas reporting was not as good for what I wanted. CPU pinning is great, especially getting into AI. Having the base OS on a thumb drive is awesome, again for ease of upgrading hardware. To be completely honest, when I tried Truenas after using Unraid for a few years, I found it lacking in a lot of important (for me) areas. They both have pluses and minuses, but they both kind of fall into the trap of whichever one you are used to is the best one.
I appreciate the video and hard going into it. I am a truenas core user and looking for bare metal replacement/extra backup and this is gold content for me to make a decision on
I am an equal opportunity homelabber. I started with TerraMaster and lost my JBOD. Went to OpenMediaVault and ran that for a good bit. Moved to TrueNAS Core when I could afford a good server. Just upgraded to yet another server and went to Scale. Really liking Scale at the moment. I have a full “unlimited” license for unRAID and plan on running this as my next server to see if I can offload my docker stuff to it or just explore it better with unmatched drives. Looking forward to the future of both Scale and unRAID.
I've been using unraid for just about a year now. All your comments about it here and in your Unraid video are spot on. For my cloud file storage (Nextcloud) I actually ended up installing mirrored pair of SSDs unassigned as a ZFS Pool. I wanted my cloud storage files to always be fast on read or write. Then I backup the Nextcloud files to the array and to a CSP. It's a bit of a waste because older stuff is always on the SSD. What I would really like is to be able to tell the OS "Keep all stuff accessed within the last X days on the SSDs and move the rest off to the HDDs in the array". Maybe there is a way to do that and I just haven't figured it out yet.
What always bothers me is: they are so much more than a NAS... what if I just want storage with a GUI and not all the stuff tacked onto it? Currently looking into TurnKey Fileserver... maybe that will suit me better.
This was one of the best UR/TN comparison videos I've watched, thank you. I'm sticking with TN. I don't see how this would divide users, it's simply a good average comparison of each systems implementation of features and how it might benefit the end user needs and experience.
Im an older guy who's familiar with HW raid and it's robustness against power loss. I have not used ZFS but im wondering how it compares in terms of power loss? Im worried about loss of transactional data or in-memory data which appears to be checkpointed but may be lost. Is there any good videos covering the difference in reliability between traditional HW Raid and ZFS?
For me, UNRAID. I appreciate you doing the comparison, it did bring to light some things I didn't really give much thought to. I am a homelabber who did use Truenas for a while on my QNAP 4bay and super spiffy server virtualized. I did have to learn UNRAID as well as Truenas. Their different but for just needing to make a few samba shares to back up my macs and get stuff to and fro' my proxmox UNRAID didn't give much hassle like Truenas did. So I reiterate, for me, I choose UNRAID.
I'm not entirely sure this was a fair video in my opinion, you mention TrueNAS is your daily but yet have only used Unraid for a month or two. Which to me, doesn't really give much of a fair comparison as like you mentioned, a UI is a UI and once you learn where things are, you remember how to navigate through it. There's a bunch of features in this video you mention Unraid doesn't have but are available to you on the UI, granted not the best visibility wise but they're there. I feel like this video would be a good comparison if you had as much experience on TrueNAS as you do Unraid.
Hey, have you decided which system you're going to install? I already have a TrueNAS server with data and services, and I'm planning to move the application to something else, but what? Currently, TrueNAS doesn't support TrueCharts, which makes it difficult to install a large number of applications (in an easy way). Unraid is not an option because it has too many drawbacks. So, I'm thinking of setting up a virtual machine on TrueNAS that will run all the applications. But now the questions are: Which system? What service to manage all the applications? (something like TrueNAS, so it would be possible to update, configure, and install applications), Docker? Docker-compose? Or maybe Kubernetes? Could you consider this topic?
Thank you for all that you do! You provide amazing in depth unbiased reviews that I am sure is very time consuming. Please don’t read the comments and keep light shine brightly. 😊
Giving TrueNAS the tie for filesystem because is used ZFS exclusively instead of it being one of many options on Unraid was wild. And no snapshot for appdata for unraid? It’s one of the most downloaded plugins available! It basically core functionality.
I have to agree. I've been running TrueNas since 2014 and Unraid since 2020 and Tim clearly doesn't understand why Unraid is so popular. With ZFS, I simply couldn't change anything about my storage pools or capacity without spending thousands all at once to replace all my drives or add a striped set. It's extremely expensive to maintain and expand long term. With Unraid, I just find a drive on sale and buy it. That's it. I can increase my array by 22TB by spending $400 bucks, not $2400. At the end of the day, if I lose my Linux ISO collection, I can just download it again. I simply don't need the protection of ZFS for these files, it's an extremely expensive exercise in frustration and maintenance. Sorry Tim, but you took away points for the very reason Unraid exists. You just don't need enterprise level data integrity for media, it's an incredibly expensive and wasteful approach for most home media storage. I have a 12 drive array in ZFS and I can't expand it without spending thousands. The difference is night and day. All that being said, I love ZFS for storing my photos and important files, which is why I run both OSes.
My experience with Unraid, I manage my landlord's server which was originally set up by his son (my friend), has not been very good. I find Unraid UX pretty terrible. I also don't like that it relies on the USB stick for the OS drive and that the license is tied to the unique USB key. Most major power failures (even with a UPS, since I could never get it to talk to the UPS) the USB drive has to be repaired because the OS kernel panics on boot up. I'm seriously looking at TrueNAS to replace this home NAS and Plex server.
I personally don't see it biased. I've used both unraid and truenas, and I've had a lot better luck with NAS related data migration and parity rebuilding in truenas. I'm glad that unraid is gradually improving their software, but there's a lot of areas that they need to focus on that they have not. They found a way to increase the price, but not implement needed updates to their software.
TrueNAS is just that…a NAS. Unraid is much better when used as a media server. The Docker implementation (and how you add shares to containers) is sooooo much better on Unraid than TrueNAS. I’m also genuinely shocked he gave the nod to TrueNAS for the App Store and VMs. Unraid is so much better IMO.
If you like your data you can keep your data ? I started with FreeNas the forerunner of TrueNas core and later TrueNas scale. In that beginning it booted from a USB stick just like today’s Unraid. I never had more problems in my life than with a USB solution. Sticks would hiccup, the community recommended, you need a better stick. Sticks would fail to boot after time, community, you need to choose a better USB manufacture. As FreeNas evolved you could backup your configuration, mirror your boot device and finally ZFS it. However, today, TrueNas will constantly complain if you try to use a USB stick as a boot device and they strongly recommend that you don’t set yourself up for failure. I love the MacGyver spirit that Unraid allows, to roll your own JBOD solution with whatever you have lying around. But don’t start building a data safety net out of weakest link components. At the minimum replace that USB with an SSD USB solution. Remember if you break it you get to keep both pieces.
Quick question: Can I run website hosting service like vps, share hosting, wordpress hosting,etc., using Unraid NAS? If yes, could you please make a video on it.
Great video Tim! Unraid does some amazing stuff, but data security is too high on my list to use it now. TrueNAS is a great product but I shy away from the apps on it. I myself run a Debian machine with docker and portainer. I do not feel like you divided anything, just gave a great perspective on what you think. To me that is more valuable then anything else.
Just wanna rectify the info on the Apps and Appstore segment about Unraid not being able to backup its data. While it,s not done automatically, Unraid is much more flexible in that you can backup your appdata folder (the meta your dockers create and use) on your array, which is protected. If you lose a container for any reason, you can remove it and redownload it, and the data is effectively kept separate so it's totally safe. Hence why I love Unraid for my home server. (I do use TureNas for it's long-term offiste backup).
I think its the subscription associated with Un-Raid that makes it a harder pill to swallow, that being said there's a lot to say about what is your home - home stuff that you want to leave untouched and the ones that you want to tinker with so Un-raid certainly has a place there
I'm curious how well these two systems support intel's performance cores/efficiency cores? After all, in windows we had to upgrade to the latest win11 for a better way of scheduling the cores
for me, biggest dealbreaker is lack of native file management GUI, Synology DSM, CasaOS Files and now even UGreen NAS OS all provide easy user-friendly GUI to do basic file operations from its NAS web interface
File manager is the icon right next to the terminal icon! It has been there for a while but I don't think it was even needed! I still use terminal to run MC (Midnight Commander) which I very much prefer!
TT, thanks for this. I was digging around looking into what my next NAS and Plex server hardware will be, and it appears that TrueNAS on a single box is the solution. I'm excited that I won't have to be dealing with the complexities of two discrete devices. I'd love to have a rack mountable server, and noticed that it appears you used what looks like a drawer? HA! I'll dig through your videos as I am sure you talked about it already.
In level to technical aptitude, if I were to recommend to a friend, I’d choose Synology, Unraid, TrueNAS. I personally use TrueNAS but despite all the clear technical wins, just plugging in another drive has a huge weight.
Is there a specific reason you recommend Synology over QNAP for NAS? I'm thinking of upgrading my NAS from a cheap 2 bay QNAP and am uncertain if I should go with a prebuilt as I would likely leave the NAS for my parents to use when I eventually have my own place.
I’ve been using scale for a couple years. Something that I think deserved mention, even though you said you were ignoring the future, is that scale is ditching k3s/helm. I think there are going to be a lot of pissed off users when that happens and would likely affect my decision if I were comparing options today. I just finished migrating my scale server to jails/docker because Plex and application updates completely quit working (thanks truecharts!) and I basically wiped out my entire library during troubleshooting.
So blue has one option and then red has that same option plus more... And you're calling it a tie? I might be reading too much into this but it feels like this might be very slight hit job?
Again, like I said, not about file system but if you value data integrity or storage optimization. That’s why it’s a tie because it’s ultimately up to you.
@@TechnoTim okay I think I'm understanding where you're coming from. So because they both share one of the options you're saying it's a toss-up for that option. I guess I was looking at it more of unread has additional options that are available so therefore it's the winter. But that's not really why you were coming from. All good. Thank you for the explanation
Thanks for the video, I’m building my first NAS after leaving a Synology, and I’m looking at truenas unraid and proxmox. What you think of CasaOS and Umbrel OS?
Casa and Umbrel Os arent really made for NAS applications.... for a solution that doesnt need much knowledge or maintenance Unraid is the better and easy option. For me the pirce of Unraid makes it not so appealing as i dont have that high of an income. True Nas is really robust and great but has a lot of things that need to be learned in order tzo make it function well.
Would be interested to hear your thoughts on open media vault as well with this sort of comparison. Been using it a while but i notice truenas or unraid seem to be preferred.
The reason I went with unraid was because I can mix\match different size HDDs. Very easy to upgrade to larger HDDs without replacing all exist drives at once.
In unraid you can create ZFS pools and snapshot/replicate to another Unraid ZFS pool. You can put your containers and VM's in ZFS pools and snap/replicate those too.
Not a bad comparison but you might have started out with the fact that you have years of time invested in Truenas and maybe a month in Unraid, at least that is what it looks like from your other videos. As someone that has working the industry for as long as raid has existed I have one big reason to use Unraid. A raid array can handle x disk failures, as can an Unraid array, but in raid, x + 1 means 100% data loss, with Unraid all the unaffected disks still retain all the data that is easily usable. Also for a home user the ability to spin down unused drive not only saves power but saves wear on the drives.
I still prefer the true DIY approach. Unraid uses btrfs as the base filesystem but it uses it's own Software RAID solution which is mostly a glorified fork of LVM, it's also Slackware based.
Just recycled some parts to make my first NAS over the weekend, been watching thousands of videos of truenas vs unraid, still can't make up my mind jfc...
I know I’ve said it before but you somehow never fail to read my mind. Or maybe the other way around. I’m on unraid and looking to explore my options and what are the odds you literally compared the two, two weeks ago🤯
I like Unraid for the ease of creating a all in one Server/Workstation. I pass through a GPU, SSD, and USB card to a VM and I have one box to use as my PC and also a nice ZFS NAS system for serving movies, home security, cloud storage, ad blocking, password manager, and Minecraft server.
Data expansions is pretty much the main reason I am sticking with unraid. I am getting full on current storage? Pop down to the local electronics shop, buy a hard drive, pop it in.
I still feel like I would prefer TrueNAS over unraid. The unraid licensing process is a pain. Also have mixed feelings on the tiers and cost of unraid. TrueNAS gives me more flexibility to tinker and upgrade as I see fit. One thing I would like to see is a NAS operating system that I can just throw a bunch of random drives in and dynamically change the pool. Sounds like unraid can do that for the most part but I want something with less caveats.
You should have a metric about learning curve and install hassle. TrueNAS is usually chosen for user like me who downscale my hassle from bare metal Linux. Whereas Unraid is chosen for those who upscale their hassle from AIO NAS boxes.
I was going to use TrueNas Scale, but vs Core I see Scale is a work in progress, some features are missing and it hasn't, apparently, been optimised liked Core. Simple things, which I can do on Synology, like enabling and forcing SMB encryption, and setting the minimum version to 3, cannot be done in the UI - I need to set those. So I'm now looking at Unraid. I don't get why Scale doesn't have this in the UI.
Saying iscsi isn't available on unraid is like saying 'insert any feature here' isn't installed by default on 'insert Linux distro here'. It's literally a one button install. Same with snapshots, appdata backup, intel GPU top, or the hundreds of easily viewable and installable plugins available. You put this big emphasis on snapshotting appdata for some reason, even though it's so small you can use the appdata backup. You could have installed appdata on zfs if you were so concerned. But you know what happens when appdata goes away? Nothing really, the system will recreate it for you. And when you go to the store it shows what you had installed previously. Just download your apps again, nothing lost. VMS can be installed on zfs and can be snapshotted. If you don't want to install the one click install for gui then you can do it from terminal. And not sure your issue with hardware passthrough. I have it setup easily. Name one OS that you stop at default install and don't setup for you personal needs? Seriously, if you had spent 10 minutes looking at a video on unraids most popular plugins you could get rid of 99% of your complaints. I like that unRaid is on USB and not tied to hardware. I can't count how many times I've moved it to to other systems. And the best part? Not wasting valuable disks for storage to an OS. Entire OS can be saved to backup or cloud in just a minute. Last is electricity. I have zfs on 6 ssd's, and bulk storage on 12 mechanical. They all spin down and only access one disk when needed. That saves a lot on electricity and noise.
Thanks, while I respect your opinion. I agree that there are many plugins and apps to do a million different things (or the same thing a million different ways) but I think that a majority if this should be included in the product. That's my take, from a product perspective. As yes, I spent more than 10 minutes, more like 300+ hours with Unraid over the last few months, over 60 alone while writing this video. The cache drive is a great idea for saving electricity and something that would be great if they highlighted this as a feature.
Not sure why multiple people are taking about spinning drives down, I guess unless you are in Europe. Drives should be spinning 24/7 for maximum lifespan, access and performance.
@@TechnoTim Respect your opinion too, but not following common procedures and setting it up correctly from the start for any os is a disservice to your viewers. Like saying if something goes wrong, no way to restore data, no way to take snapshots of appdata (which you don't need to do, but can). Again if you don't do appdata backup, you just redownload. But yet you spent a lot of time and praise on all the steps needed to add apps to trunas (which isn't included in product). Or to say there is no way to do custom feeds in store (there is).
@@wojtek-33 Jea but if you life in Europe this is the singel biggest reason for Unraid for a lot of People. I have a 130 Tb Unraid System and a 170 Tb TrunasScale system. But i use Truenas just for Backups. My Unraid run 24/7 but of course with spinn down. If i would let the drives spinn all the time it would coste me easy over $400 a year just to let the drives on. Same with GPU vs iGPU and so on. Every 100W you have running 24/7 cost you about $350 a year.
Can't go with unraid because the value just isn't there. They are charging a premium for features that might come in a future release, not to mention the "not a subscription" subscription. Not to mention saying the increase was to focus on development and not advertising then immediately launching a paid affiliate program. For Truenas, it is just not intuitive for someone new who doesn't understand the 10 different kinds of cache and can't afford huge hdd's from the jump. What did it for me was having movies on an external disk that I could not feed into plex, or at least figure out how to do it. If there was a system that was a combination of the two I would be on it.
The premium is easily paid for by repurposing drives. URs target audience is someone growing into a full NAS, where TrueNAS is for someone building a (near)enterprise solution. If you already have an external or 3, Unraid is the way to go.
What I really need to know is this. Which has the least memory requirements? Trying to reuse an old server that is hard coded at a 2GB limit. Whatever I chose had to fit within that.
With unraid you can make snapshots of your appdata by ensuring the disk with appdata on it is formatted with a file system that supports snapshots such as btrfs or zfs. Of course it’s then best practice to send that snapshot to another disk in the array that also uses that same file system.
11:46 there is option in unraid to add your own repo :) its on te left I started with TrueNAS Core and bounced off because of bhyve, then i settled on Unraid for last couple years. I'm lucky one with 1-time payment for license and i can upgrade it (i use Plus one for now). I really like how TrueNAS Scale looks and works, but it's better for me to just add single drive to whole array if i need to expand :) Edit: I hope there will be second part for this video as "Community Best NAS" or something.
After releasing this video I quickly realized what these types of video do, they divide people and that was not my intention. I went into this naively thinking that it would bring people together. I did spend a lot of time researching, testing, and putting this video together and didn't know where it was going to take me. For those that don't agree with me, or other comments, that's actually great! I ALWAYS want to hear other opinions and I welcome those that differ from mine! New ideas and different opinions not only make me a better homelabber, but a better person so thank you!
People always find something to hate on the Internet. I appreciate the comparison.
I appreciate you taking a look at alternative OS. The people demand choice.
As a long term unraid user, I think it was pretty fair.
The subscription model annoys a lot of people and unraid does have some “essentials” that aren’t provided out of the box leaning on plugins and people to self learn. On the flip side it has a great community, and good customer service if you ever need help.
At the end of the day though if you want a NAS where you can grow the array by just throwing new disks in every few years, it’s the only solution and a great one. If you don’t want a paid license and are happy with buying all your discs up front truenas fits better.
It’s great we have options in the homelab space!
You're doing great job and it's very informative to soak the experiences from someone like you! I wouldn't call a discussions below something that "divides" - just different observations and experiences shared by some storage nerds community. Thanks to that we have whole picture - yours and users.
Overall I think it’s a goid video but the main issue is that from a Unraid user perspective this seems a bit unfair (at least to me)
You should have really looked into the forums and the community in general at Unraid and especially the Support threads for Plugins and containers or even Discord.
Everything is there including tutorials. Your issue with HW transcoding would be solved in
2:00 i think the video can conclude here lmao
Yeah, but you get what you pay for in this world.
I think this video presents a valid point about the state of Unraid today, which is that a lot of features one would expect to be out of the box is actually quite reliant on community developers and plug-ins; things like historical and granular reporting, native backups and snapshots, and a cohesive design language. Watching a new user's experience without all the bells and whistles of the quality of life plugins I've accumulated over the years and I can see where a new user today might be left feeling a bit wanting.
As a user of Unraid for over 8 years, I've loved the simplicity and easy learning curve when it comes to the OS, especially from a non-enterprise background. It's taught me a lot about linux, containers, vms, networking, everything in between. Seeing some of these features in TrueNas definitely made me wish it was also natively part of Unraid.
I use both. One of the key benefits of Unraid is partial survivability past the n+x limit, the ability to use simple data recovery methods on any single failed drive, and even the ability to force recovery of in a greater than n+x situation where a portion of the data on the loss plus 1 drive is partially accessible. Oh and you can also create ZFS pools in Unraid.
Translation For the non-techies:
In RAID5 (which is the most common for homelab RAIDs, where you "loose" one drive of capacity, so 1+1+1+1 = 3), if one drive fails - you are ok. Replace that drive and everything is back to working like before.
In RAID6 (where you "loose" two drives of capacity, so 1+1+1+1 = 2) it is even ok if two disks fail. Replace both and everything is back to working.
However: If even a single drive more than allowed fails (so two defects in RAID5 or three in RAID6) then you loose everything.
In Unraid it is up to you if you add zero, one or two "parity" drives. Most users will go with one. Each disk will add a redundancy safety net. As long as you have at least as many parity drives as the number of disks that fail you will not loose any data (just like a RAID system). Replace the disks and it will continue to work.
And then there is the difference to RAID: If more drives fail than you have parity drives, then you will only loose the data that is stored on the failed drives. All the rest of your data that is stored on disks that still work is still unharmed and can be accessed.
Yup. I use TrueNAS for my cold(er) storage - its ZFS interface is much easier. That's where all my local backups go.
I use Unraid for the actual live storage, and running all the "fun" stuff (media, game servers, etc...).
WARNING : TrueNas dropped kubernetes support in favor of Docker compose in the next version. This caused TrueCharts to completely drop support of TrueNas SCALE, even on the current version. This has leaved me in a state where I cannot install new apps or upgrade existing ones, despite still being on a version of TrueNas that should still support it.
This is a big no go from me. Found this out the hard way yesterday when i tried to install TrueCharts and could not.
This is exactly why I nuked my truenas scale server and spun up unraid
@@mrdrux Did the same.
I can understand frustration finding out that a feature you frequently use suddenly stopped working, but in a wider context switching from Kubernetes to Docker Compose is a great move people ware waiting for. You can ditch TrueChart and their outdated apps and use a power of Docker and awesome Docker Compose configs. Many people, including myself, had to do workarounds to use our beloved Docker Compose. Not any more!
I think it really depends on your use case and what you expect.
One thing I'm looking into for my next NAS with UnRaid is single drive use and spindown. Because ZFS or any raid system, when you need one file, the whole raid is used so it's heat, noise and power usage.
Since UnRaid is basically disk stripping with extra steps, only the disk that contains the file is used.
So if like me your NAS is for storage with single files access and you don't have a need for more than single drive perf then UnRAID looks like a valid choice for my use case.
Otherwise I would go with TrueNAS any other day (as I already have)
get an external disk, why would you even need a nas then?
@@blyatspinat that's an awesome idea! Who would have thought! Do you happen to have a 120tb external hard drive that's network accesible?
@@Kernelcoffee no problem, just wait a few years im sure we will reach 120TB some day
The Unraid array isn't striped - which is why it can spin up/down single disks. The disks are only virtually concatenated. But otherwise, yes I agree with your points, which is why I've been running Unraid for 6+ years and why I'll continue to use it for NAS. My largest portioned pool is going to be ZFS going forward however, even with its requirements of all-or-none spin. It's not a big deal when you set your timeout period reasonably.
I think that one of the great advantages that Unraid has over any other NAS OS is the shallow learning curve. This lets less sophisticated users, like me, install their own home lab and have the full range of use of all the features available to more pro users. Like Docker containers, VMs and hosting your own services like Immich and Nextcloud. I played with Freenas and then Truenas for a bit and I barely got it to run let alone deploy a container.
Now that my Unraid server is running like it should, I have had the opportunity to learn Docker and how to use a Linux console a nice introduction, in my opinion, to more advanced knowledge.
This is something most people like to forget. Unraid compared to proxmox, truenas, and others is so much simpler to understand, to navigate, and to get going out of the box. I know most people who watch this kind of content are already wizards at this stuff, but not everyone wants to be a Linux grand master - they want an easy operating system to back up some files and call it a day.
Agree. ZFS is not intuitive nor easy to understand. Unraid makes this simple.
Also you should not underestimate the community. I use Unraid since 2019 and 90% of the problems and challenges I had were either covered on their Forum or you can find a guide on TH-cam.
I doubt there is a person who uses Unraid who at some point didn't watch "Spaceinvader One" videos or other guys like Ibracorp. It really made the learning curve much simpler at the start.
you call yourself a pro user but can manage to get these things running with k3s on scale? sounds weird to me
Really? I've worked in IT for nearly 20 years, went to college for electronics and computers, have been using a PC for about 40 years since I was a kid. Sure, most of my experience has been Windows and DOS before that, but I've worked with Linux and Mac too, I've even done programming in school (hated it, so I ended up in support). I can't stand the Unraid UI/UX, it's unintuitive, weird, and hard to mangae, things aren't straight forward. Why should I have to install an app (that is actually a desktop Linux GUI app) to brows the files from the WebUI, how stupid is that? Basic functionality was missing out of the box, had to install add ons. I would never have chosen Unraid myself. The choice of storing the OS drive on the USB instead of a HDD/SSD is short sighted to say the least. Relying on a USB stick for the OS drive is far from fault tolerant (ask me how I know!). Maybe it's my ADHD brain, maybe it's my Windows bias, but honestly, I doubt it.
You can take snapshots of appdata on Unraid if you create a cache pool using ZFS and keep appdata on that cache pool. There's also a Community Apps plug-in that will make scheduled cron jobs to backup appdata to a separate location.
As a user of both (and some qnaps aside), I have to defend Unraid just a little, as some of the cons are not really a cons:
- Having system on small usb drive let's you save one drive which can be critical for some small home users. And the backup of it is set as default during the nightly backups. You can just use it to write a system to new one anytime you want without disk swaps
- system on pendrive also allows you to easily move the system to, for example, vm in proxmox with just a small usb passthru
- ISCSi exists and it's doing great job
- For those who do not keep homelab in separate room, ZFS and constantly spinning drives can be annoying. Due to Unraid specific storage management, some of my disks are actually sleeping most of the time saving energy
- it's much more small system friendly (RAM)
- for years it was a perfect example of easiness in passthrough - just click the device and add. I have no clue what happened but also started to have issues with passing some gpus (nvidia)
You can also have drives spin down in something like TrueNAS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@Shadoweee Not really. Since Unraid is not raid, it will wake up only one drive to save the data to, not the whole array. Since putting disks to sleep and waking up constantly is never a good idea, add to this extra power consumption - those are not the same.
I had to migrate an Unraid system the other day, and I just moved the Unraid USB and the hard drives to the new system, and it just worked. I was against the Unraid USB method at first, but I really see its value now.
@@Shadoweee Nah, only having the option to install it on the usb drive is idiotic. the fact that you dont even have the option for redundancy. also license key tied to the thumb drive is also stupid, the fact that you have to wait 12 months or reach out to support to move the license. the functionality for the use case is good, but the fact that there is no alternative option sucks. also, saving 1 drive is mostly only useful because of their own licensing. No home users are going to run out of sata ports for an OS that costs 50$ at minimum, for a pc that only has 2-4 sata ports, users will use something else thats cheaper as cost is a factor. for ones that have more sata ports, 6-8+, users can use m.2 for boot drives and are not strapped for ports.
@@yasheshshah3967 wrong tag mate :)
For what its worth, I currently have 3 Truenas Scale Machines and a few proxmox machines in my rack. All with different use cases. Now I'm new to the whole "homelab" thing and my background is in construction, but after probably about a week or so of videos from Level1Techs, Lawrence Systems, and you I had gotten pretty comfortable with it and now I would say I'm fairly good with the system. I figured that if I was going to get into something I might as well jump into the deep end and hopefully not have to relearn something else down the line and I couldn't be happier. Now I will admit that with my construction business I was able to "write off" almost all of the cost of the building of the machines because of "office upgrades" since I use them for backup of the business and to host software for managing my company, but as far as out of the box experience I don't think I made the wrong choice. Thanks for all the information you post! Your a real MVP.
I've been an unRAID user for several years now. The key is tied to your account and you have the option of doing a cloud backup of your flash drive. So really, you don't lose your config if the flash drive fails.
Ive been using unraid for many years. It still a great choice, but overall, if it was easier to switch my huge array I would probably migrate to truenas. Snapshots and the faster performance are the big ticket items that are tempting me.
Some of the items you mention seem like you didnt give UnRaid a fair shake. I'm backing up my VMs nightly and have hardware pass-through working without much fuss.
That's not to say I'm all in on team UnRaid. Their new subscription model is a non-starter for me (if i hadn't already had a non-subscription license).
I tried to be as fair as possible and gave an in-depth explanation as to why and it's OK if you don't agree. VMs don't support snapshots and GPU passthrough has been harder than doing it on Proxmox, and that's 100% manual. These are two things I value, I totally understand if that's not what you value!
@@TechnoTimI mean, in 2024 we can't live without snpshot! Yes, backing UP is a thing, but snapshots are not backup. When you do a snapshot and just "try" something, the time you need to restore the previous state is virtually non-existent and you cannot say the same thing if you need to restore a backup, maybe trough a gigabit connection.
I would argue that the subscription model will bring in funds needed to develop things like VM and Docker snapshots
@TechnoTim I appreciate the video for sure. I have been using UnRaid for about 5 years now and at the time TrueNas was behind in some areas. Your review shows me that it's time to give TrueNas another try. I don't think you had any ill intent at all or intended bias. Don't let a healthy debate keep you from continuing with these types of videos.
@@fabriziop.3360 Snapshots are what I mentioned specifically. Sure, both can back up any folder to any other folder or system.
It seems to me that you are not very familiar with Unraid. For storage you touched on the array setup but not pools. Lots of Unraid user run zpools on unraid and it supports snapshots the same as TrueNas. You also have the option of running a traditional Unraid array making Unraid the clear winner in storage to me. As far as applications templates are stored by the app store on Unraid. Appdata Backup allows you to backup your appdata either manually or on a schedule or if you run a zfs cache which I do you can also take snapshots of your datasets.
I have been using TrueNAS for the last 3 years and it has worked for me well. I was not a big fan of using a USB for my OS with Unraid. The issue that I currently have is that my apps will not utilize my GPU. I look for a solution on that right now. I have to say that Techno TIm is correctly you have select an OS that best fits you. I have recommend both OS to people.
I appreciate your honest explanations. I went trunas, but have friends who don't fiddle with their system nearly as much as I like to, and they swear by Unraid, cause for simple stuff its easy. They also wanted to make use of all the hard drives they have ever purchased regardless of age or size.
3:23 - What happens if my USB boot device fails?
You can manually transfer your license to a new USB Flash device at any time up to once per year. After that, contact support. (Copied from unRAID web page)
Sounds like you are one that hasn't tried their backup to connect and then restore? It's fairly seamless.
@@fwiler I haven't used any of those Nas softwares yet, but I am currently deciding between all of them. I just wanted to point out an error in the video.
@@renerant read my comment earlier
Kenel panic after power loss is a deal breaker for me, no fault tolerance. And saying "you should have a UPS" isn't an answer, you can have sudden power loss for a multitude of reasons even with a UPS (failed UPS server communication and batteries run out, accidentally pulling the USB stick, pulling the power cable accidentally, etc). If even MS-DOS could survive a sudden power loss when booted from a floppy disk, then Unraid should when booted from a USB stick. I've had to rebuild the USB stick too many times. I'm looking at TrueNAS as a replacement.
You can add iSCSI in UnRAID through a Plugin.
You can also create ZFS arrays alongside the UnRAID array in UnRAID which makes it more flexible than TrueNAS. The downside is that the UnRAID ZFS array implementation doesn't have a nice GUI (yet) to manage snapshots and other aspects of the ZFS array.
I like UnRAID for home use, however, I wouldn't use it for business use either.
Outside of the seething bias that the creator claims they don't have, despite the plethora of comments pointing it out, I'm glad that so many comments have corrected many of the issues with this comparison video and pointed out other flaws.
As someone who is investigating moving from Windows Server to unRaid or TrueNAS, the comment section was very informative as I research what makes more sense in my use case.
I am sure it's already been mentioned but the next version of TrueNas will allow for adding drives to a pool, FINALLY. So flexibility is coming.
link to that pls?
@@TheNorthRemember it's on the change log page in the what's new for EE.
Maybe you should take some energy measurements as well. I choose Unraid because of its ability to send harddrives individual to sleed whem the are not longer needed. Other than in a typically raid only the drive where the file i want needs to spin up. Every file will always stay on one harddrive.
This is also the reason for many why they use a cpu with integrated gpu instead of a dedicated gpu. In a land like Germany energy costs are quite expensive and for that reason i choose Unraid.
This is such a great point. Why is this common knowledge among longtime users but not something that's in their product documentation? This is something they should really promote.
@@TechnoTim In the German community, there is a real competition to see who gets the most energy-efficient server put together. There are some hard-working people who measure the consumption of many motherboards, CPUs and power supplies. For example, servers that consume more than 30W in "Idel mode" (only the Unraid runs without active Docker and VM, as well as with disks in the spin-down) are already rated as poor. Really good is who makes it under the magic 10W.
You can also choose when to put drives to sleep on truenas, but it's usually not recommended to often put hard disk drives to sleep.
@@Locationary You don't want drives constantly spinning up and down all the time, granted, but on my NAS I only use the backup volume 2 hours a day, the media volume maybe three times a week, so it's nuts to have 4 drives spinning away at 7200 rpm 24x7. If you can put 'always on' stuff on SSD you may be able to have the spinning rust powered down nearly all the time. That's not likely to be a problem.
@@paulwoodward8265 Unraid does this exact thing. If you configure it with one or more cache drives it will store files like vm disks, docker files and system data directly onto the cache drive therefore allowing the hard drives to spin down for very long periods of time if configured correctly. Great for power and noise concerns. Personally i think that's one of Unraid's party tricks along with the ability to throw random hard drives in so long as they aren't a bigger capacity than the parity drive.
Thank you for putting together this comparison! I never bothered to do the research or even try both out myself, so this is super useful (and saves me a ton of time). I build my NAS from scratch and it's running netatalk for macOS-native shares and Time Machine backups and NFS for more Linux-y shares on other machines in my homelab. Maybe running apps from the app stores is easier than setting it up and maintaining it myself, so I think I'll check out probably TrueNAS next.
re: price, for home use. If you have odd sized drives laying about, unraid might be cheaper than the drives you have to buy to make true nas work, or cheaper than the value of the storage you can't use because it doesn't fit in true nas' purist system.
(my spicy take: youtubers who get WD to send them a pile of enterptise HDD's don't get to complain about the price of unraid, without disclosing all the drives they can't use in true NAS...)
oooo someone went to unraid
@@fearian THIS
Cutting out plugins from Unraid severely limits the OS from a review perspective. Unraid’s ecosystem is very much a “here the base OS, add in anything you need” sort of mentality. You can easily grow your understanding of the OS with this approach. Learn about this thing called iSCSI? See if there’s a plugin for it, then check the community forum for how it works, how to set it up, etc.
As for data integrity, I think a big miss is the value of the Unraid array. 2 dead disks in a raidz1 means FULL DATA LOSS, where your Unraid array will only lose the data in the borked disks. For a home user environment, that’s a HUGE win in my book. Enterprise is different. They have offsite/tape backups as standard practice, where a home user likely can’t afford full redundancy on a large NAS.
Also: saying “I’m just talking the base OS, no add-ons or plugins”, but then mentions adding custom app feeds to TrueNAS feels a bit off.
Overall, I think Tim needs some more time with the OS. Maybe a relook after “fixing” his issues with each OS via plugins, scripts, etc. and a little more time learning each system. Not knowing how to click the lock icon in Unraid to show the “X” to remove cards in the dashboard for example.
Click the green lock icon on the upper right of the stats page in unRAID to customize. Took me a while of digging for that one but it's pretty simple. I have been on the fence for a while, using UR at the moment but don't take advantage of the array. I have one parity and one drive to make UR happy then ZFS pools for the rest, probably going back to TNS now for the data integrity. Thanks for your efforts even though you are getting some flack from seasoned UR users, if you drove it for years like TN they still wouldn't be happy.
Unraid has the ability to back up the USB drive to your unraid account with unraid connect. I never even have to think about let alone worry about it.
I still find it pretty clunky to have a USB stick dangling on the server. Can the image not be written to an internal drive or something? I really don't understand how can anyone think that a USB stick is a production ready device for storing a system as critical as NAS storage. Everything that depends on your NAS storage depends by extension on your USB stick. One unlucky bump during maintenance, one unlucky power surge, or whatever and there goes your boot drive, now you need to get a new one and flash it again, while everything you run depends on volatile memory
@@kolterdyxThey make tiny USB drives the size of wireless mice adapters, but yeah I agree. At least let me run them with redundancy or something. However, considering you need cache drives for unraid and likely 2 of them, that leaves ITX motherboard users without a place to install their OS.
@@kolterdyx The USB acts like a dongle as the license is bound to its ID - that is why - not saying I like it. But i. e. you could use emmc device like i.e. Linctstaion N1 does which isn't as prone to fail like USB sticks do. Unraid tries to alleviate the problem with backups of you stick to images or your account so you can recover them when needed in case of failure and these backup can be scheduled though an app.The USB acts like a dongle as the license is bound to its ID - that is why - not saying I like it. But i. e. you could use emmc device like i.e. Linctstaion N1 does which isn't as prone to fail like USB sticks do. Unraid tries to alleviate the problem with backups of you stick to images or your account so you can recover them when needed in case of failure and these backup can be scheduled though an app.
For me, TrueNAS. I don't need all the features TrueNAS provides so I run it in proxmox. I'm well aware that proxmox and do zfs out of the box, but I prefer using the features TrueNAS provides for monitoring my drives over proxmox's meager options.
While i appreciate the video and the comparison I did miss you talking about what unraid does better then truenas, for example I found it easier to use with more documentation. When in the installer its wayyy easier then what truenas has. It felt for me like this video was a pull towards truenas (as it won 99% of the comparisons you made). In the end you said that it depends on the use cases but what i missed in the video was what usecases unraid would be better for (as you only explained yours).
Did appriciate the video, thanks and hope you do well and continue the amazing videos.
Have a good one!
Appreciate the fair comparison for now and would love to see a follow up of your understanding and breakdown for Unraid after a longer time using it, maybe a few months or a full year with all the customizations and learnings from the active Unraid community and its constantly updating apps, etc.
Been running UNRAID since the Lime Tech days… for those that like to mix drive sizes and build as you go and don’t need high speed storage, it’s the way to go. Both OS have large support communities now, but years ago UNRAID had an edge there IMO. As you say at the end, both are good solutions depending on your use cases.
I agree with you as I have a mixed drive (60TB) setup and went to Unraid as Truenas can't handle this as my smallest drive is 6TB and the largest 18TB.
Only to bad about the new subscription services.
Tried Truenas first and was difficult to setup as a new novice user who has build his first nas, Unraid was running after a couple of minutes.
@@RichardErkens right. That's my takeaway... TrueNas is catching up to UnRaid and surpassing it in many ways. The biggest factor remains the matching drive requirement.
And here I am, running my NAS on some flavor of Debian with ZFS, SMB, NFS, and rsync for backups, all managed with Ansible. I may also run containers or VMs on that machine , but it's not in my NAS playbook, so that doesn't factor into it. My big problem with Unraid and True/FreeNAS is that they're trying to do too much non-NAS things. Store and share files, on a network, nothing more. Also, no Ansible, no dice.
Pro!
Is there a tutorial how to do this?
Ah, it would've been awesome if you had power efficiency as a talking point. People like me choose Unraid just because of this reason alone, as Unraid supports true SSD caching when the disks are spun down. Running HDDs 24/7 is a waste of power and HDD-lifespan.
Power efficiency makes a huge difference in Europe.
Great to know! I did discuss SSD caching but didn't think about the implications it has on spin down for disks!
@@TechnoTim to me, it is so important that I've foregone the ZFS' sweet self-healing properties
There actually are stats that would suggest that constantly spinning drives up and down shortens their lifespan vs just leaving them running. I assume it's because of the temperature cycling. But it definitely does make sense in places with expensive electricity or if you have many drives.
@@NickyNiclas Keep in mind, with a good unRAID setup with a decently sized cache you can have the disks powered off for days at a time. There is also a plugin to cache directories and files in memory so things like Plex wont wake your disks just to scan their contents. So we're not talking about spinning them down 24-48 times a day. For me only about half of my disks spin up a single time each day.
@@benjiro8793 thank u
I use both. I started with Unraid for its storage flexibility in my first homelab NAS. I also like the VM ease of setup in Unraid better than TrueNAS. I use TrueNAS as my main archival file server because I love the data integrity features, it has more remote backup and cloud sync capabilities out of the box than Unraid does, and I built that machine new with far more capacity than I will need for a while because I had the budget to do so. I like the ease of using Docker containers on Unraid, and I do use Jails on TrueNAS Core. I haven't migrated to TrueNAS Scale yet but I probably will be doing so in the next few months. I can recommend either TrueNAS or Unraid to any new homelabber or just general computer enthusiast depending on what their needs, budget, and experience level are. Or I can direct them to just buy a Synology NAS if neither of these fits their use case.
Great video! Thanks!
One thing I like on the Licensing part of UnRaid is that is not bound to any Hardware (excluded the USB-Stick). Because you can change the Hardware (Mainboard, CPU, GPU and so on) completely wihtout a need of re-deploy the Container or VMs aslong you have the same drives (HDD/SSDs/Nvmes) installed the System boots and is running like before.
I agree. I've moved my two unRaid configurations on two USB disks between different hardware setups for 10+ years. Having to reregister each time would have been a pain. The only time the USB is used is on initial boot to load the OS into RAM so read/write cycles are very minimal. The only exception would be if you turn on logging to the usb drive but you really shouldn't do that except in very specific circumstances.
Love the video, i respect your opinion.
I personally plan on using both, one is free the other is paid so i get both of best world without it being to much. I plan on using 2 QNAP D400S JBOD with 2 miniforum ms-01 machines.
Being able to learn both and use both is in my opinion the ideal way. But that's also because energy is freaking cheap where i live so i don't think about how much i use or run really.
Dashboard top right the green lock you can adjust or delete everything
Thank you!
Plus there is an explanation option, both for the whole screen and if you click on any option in the UI. Not super obvious, but explains every single thing in Unraid. Super helpful for example if you are setting up shares.
Those are fair comparisons, but I'm very glad to be running unraid. A little bit of elbow grease can equalize several of these categories, but you need to go in with eyes wide open.
TrueNas and Unraid are used in two different ways. Personally I chose Unraid for ease up upgrade. As I got used to it, I found the opposite of your conclusions. TrueNas reporting was not as good for what I wanted. CPU pinning is great, especially getting into AI. Having the base OS on a thumb drive is awesome, again for ease of upgrading hardware.
To be completely honest, when I tried Truenas after using Unraid for a few years, I found it lacking in a lot of important (for me) areas.
They both have pluses and minuses, but they both kind of fall into the trap of whichever one you are used to is the best one.
I appreciate the video and hard going into it. I am a truenas core user and looking for bare metal replacement/extra backup and this is gold content for me to make a decision on
I am an equal opportunity homelabber. I started with TerraMaster and lost my JBOD. Went to OpenMediaVault and ran that for a good bit. Moved to TrueNAS Core when I could afford a good server. Just upgraded to yet another server and went to Scale. Really liking Scale at the moment. I have a full “unlimited” license for unRAID and plan on running this as my next server to see if I can offload my docker stuff to it or just explore it better with unmatched drives. Looking forward to the future of both Scale and unRAID.
Very well done, I can tell a lot of research went into this video and we appreciate it.
I've been using unraid for just about a year now. All your comments about it here and in your Unraid video are spot on. For my cloud file storage (Nextcloud) I actually ended up installing mirrored pair of SSDs unassigned as a ZFS Pool. I wanted my cloud storage files to always be fast on read or write. Then I backup the Nextcloud files to the array and to a CSP. It's a bit of a waste because older stuff is always on the SSD. What I would really like is to be able to tell the OS "Keep all stuff accessed within the last X days on the SSDs and move the rest off to the HDDs in the array". Maybe there is a way to do that and I just haven't figured it out yet.
What always bothers me is: they are so much more than a NAS... what if I just want storage with a GUI and not all the stuff tacked onto it?
Currently looking into TurnKey Fileserver... maybe that will suit me better.
Just don’t use the features that you don’t need. Simple!
This was one of the best UR/TN comparison videos I've watched, thank you. I'm sticking with TN. I don't see how this would divide users, it's simply a good average comparison of each systems implementation of features and how it might benefit the end user needs and experience.
Grest video Tim. Ty.
My immediate goal is the use TrueNAS as my local backup server and UNRAID as a remote backup server for my Windows Server's media.
Im an older guy who's familiar with HW raid and it's robustness against power loss. I have not used ZFS but im wondering how it compares in terms of power loss? Im worried about loss of transactional data or in-memory data which appears to be checkpointed but may be lost. Is there any good videos covering the difference in reliability between traditional HW Raid and ZFS?
For me, UNRAID. I appreciate you doing the comparison, it did bring to light some things I didn't really give much thought to. I am a homelabber who did use Truenas for a while on my QNAP 4bay and super spiffy server virtualized. I did have to learn UNRAID as well as Truenas. Their different but for just needing to make a few samba shares to back up my macs and get stuff to and fro' my proxmox UNRAID didn't give much hassle like Truenas did. So I reiterate, for me, I choose UNRAID.
I'm not entirely sure this was a fair video in my opinion, you mention TrueNAS is your daily but yet have only used Unraid for a month or two. Which to me, doesn't really give much of a fair comparison as like you mentioned, a UI is a UI and once you learn where things are, you remember how to navigate through it. There's a bunch of features in this video you mention Unraid doesn't have but are available to you on the UI, granted not the best visibility wise but they're there. I feel like this video would be a good comparison if you had as much experience on TrueNAS as you do Unraid.
Hey, have you decided which system you're going to install? I already have a TrueNAS server with data and services, and I'm planning to move the application to something else, but what? Currently, TrueNAS doesn't support TrueCharts, which makes it difficult to install a large number of applications (in an easy way). Unraid is not an option because it has too many drawbacks. So, I'm thinking of setting up a virtual machine on TrueNAS that will run all the applications. But now the questions are: Which system? What service to manage all the applications? (something like TrueNAS, so it would be possible to update, configure, and install applications), Docker? Docker-compose? Or maybe Kubernetes? Could you consider this topic?
Thank you for all that you do! You provide amazing in depth unbiased reviews that I am sure is very time consuming. Please don’t read the comments and keep light shine brightly. 😊
@@clipperbob960 thank you! Comments like these mean more than you know!
@@TechnoTim @clipperbob960 the vid is actually biased maybe not tim's intensions but there's a lot of missing point in the vid regarding unraid
Great overview, thanks.
This comes off as a very biased review. I have been using unraid since 2018 and i dont think you really have it a fair shot
Giving TrueNAS the tie for filesystem because is used ZFS exclusively instead of it being one of many options on Unraid was wild.
And no snapshot for appdata for unraid? It’s one of the most downloaded plugins available! It basically core functionality.
I have to agree. I've been running TrueNas since 2014 and Unraid since 2020 and Tim clearly doesn't understand why Unraid is so popular. With ZFS, I simply couldn't change anything about my storage pools or capacity without spending thousands all at once to replace all my drives or add a striped set. It's extremely expensive to maintain and expand long term. With Unraid, I just find a drive on sale and buy it. That's it. I can increase my array by 22TB by spending $400 bucks, not $2400. At the end of the day, if I lose my Linux ISO collection, I can just download it again. I simply don't need the protection of ZFS for these files, it's an extremely expensive exercise in frustration and maintenance. Sorry Tim, but you took away points for the very reason Unraid exists. You just don't need enterprise level data integrity for media, it's an incredibly expensive and wasteful approach for most home media storage. I have a 12 drive array in ZFS and I can't expand it without spending thousands. The difference is night and day. All that being said, I love ZFS for storing my photos and important files, which is why I run both OSes.
My experience with Unraid, I manage my landlord's server which was originally set up by his son (my friend), has not been very good. I find Unraid UX pretty terrible. I also don't like that it relies on the USB stick for the OS drive and that the license is tied to the unique USB key. Most major power failures (even with a UPS, since I could never get it to talk to the UPS) the USB drive has to be repaired because the OS kernel panics on boot up. I'm seriously looking at TrueNAS to replace this home NAS and Plex server.
I personally don't see it biased. I've used both unraid and truenas, and I've had a lot better luck with NAS related data migration and parity rebuilding in truenas. I'm glad that unraid is gradually improving their software, but there's a lot of areas that they need to focus on that they have not. They found a way to increase the price, but not implement needed updates to their software.
Sounds like you are pretty bad at managing Unraid. Getting it to "talk to UPS" is extremely easy.
TrueNAS is just that…a NAS. Unraid is much better when used as a media server. The Docker implementation (and how you add shares to containers) is sooooo much better on Unraid than TrueNAS. I’m also genuinely shocked he gave the nod to TrueNAS for the App Store and VMs. Unraid is so much better IMO.
If you like your data you can keep your data ?
I started with FreeNas the forerunner of TrueNas core and later TrueNas scale. In that beginning it booted from a USB stick just like today’s Unraid. I never had more problems in my life than with a USB solution. Sticks would hiccup, the community recommended, you need a better stick. Sticks would fail to boot after time, community, you need to choose a better USB manufacture. As FreeNas evolved you could backup your configuration, mirror your boot device and finally ZFS it. However, today, TrueNas will constantly complain if you try to use a USB stick as a boot device and they strongly recommend that you don’t set yourself up for failure. I love the MacGyver spirit that Unraid allows, to roll your own JBOD solution with whatever you have lying around. But don’t start building a data safety net out of weakest link components. At the minimum replace that USB with an SSD USB solution. Remember if you break it you get to keep both pieces.
Quick question: Can I run website hosting service like vps, share hosting, wordpress hosting,etc., using Unraid NAS? If yes, could you please make a video on it.
Great video Tim! Unraid does some amazing stuff, but data security is too high on my list to use it now. TrueNAS is a great product but I shy away from the apps on it. I myself run a Debian machine with docker and portainer. I do not feel like you divided anything, just gave a great perspective on what you think. To me that is more valuable then anything else.
Just wanna rectify the info on the Apps and Appstore segment about Unraid not being able to backup its data. While it,s not done automatically, Unraid is much more flexible in that you can backup your appdata folder (the meta your dockers create and use) on your array, which is protected. If you lose a container for any reason, you can remove it and redownload it, and the data is effectively kept separate so it's totally safe. Hence why I love Unraid for my home server. (I do use TureNas for it's long-term offiste backup).
Incredible review! Thanks for taking the time to do this.
I think its the subscription associated with Un-Raid that makes it a harder pill to swallow, that being said there's a lot to say about what is your home - home stuff that you want to leave untouched and the ones that you want to tinker with so Un-raid certainly has a place there
As I understand it, you can expand a zfs pool pretty easily. You add larger capacity drives as spares and remove smaller drives through the UI.
I'm curious how well these two systems support intel's performance cores/efficiency cores? After all, in windows we had to upgrade to the latest win11 for a better way of scheduling the cores
for me, biggest dealbreaker is lack of native file management GUI,
Synology DSM, CasaOS Files and now even UGreen NAS OS all provide easy user-friendly GUI to do basic file operations from its NAS web interface
File manager is the icon right next to the terminal icon! It has been there for a while but I don't think it was even needed! I still use terminal to run MC (Midnight Commander) which I very much prefer!
TT, thanks for this. I was digging around looking into what my next NAS and Plex server hardware will be, and it appears that TrueNAS on a single box is the solution. I'm excited that I won't have to be dealing with the complexities of two discrete devices. I'd love to have a rack mountable server, and noticed that it appears you used what looks like a drawer? HA! I'll dig through your videos as I am sure you talked about it already.
With TrueNAS EE update coming in a few months moving towards docker, things should be a lot easier and give more points in their favor.
In level to technical aptitude, if I were to recommend to a friend, I’d choose Synology, Unraid, TrueNAS. I personally use TrueNAS but despite all the clear technical wins, just plugging in another drive has a huge weight.
I 100% agree with this rank for recommended a home NAS based on technical aptitude.
Is there a specific reason you recommend Synology over QNAP for NAS? I'm thinking of upgrading my NAS from a cheap 2 bay QNAP and am uncertain if I should go with a prebuilt as I would likely leave the NAS for my parents to use when I eventually have my own place.
Thanks for video, Tim! After this one I might consider give Unraid a chance... Sometime )
I’ve been using scale for a couple years. Something that I think deserved mention, even though you said you were ignoring the future, is that scale is ditching k3s/helm. I think there are going to be a lot of pissed off users when that happens and would likely affect my decision if I were comparing options today. I just finished migrating my scale server to jails/docker because Plex and application updates completely quit working (thanks truecharts!) and I basically wiped out my entire library during troubleshooting.
So blue has one option and then red has that same option plus more... And you're calling it a tie?
I might be reading too much into this but it feels like this might be very slight hit job?
Again, like I said, not about file system but if you value data integrity or storage optimization. That’s why it’s a tie because it’s ultimately up to you.
@@TechnoTim okay I think I'm understanding where you're coming from. So because they both share one of the options you're saying it's a toss-up for that option.
I guess I was looking at it more of unread has additional options that are available so therefore it's the winter. But that's not really why you were coming from.
All good. Thank you for the explanation
Thanks for the video, I’m building my first NAS after leaving a Synology, and I’m looking at truenas unraid and proxmox. What you think of CasaOS and Umbrel OS?
Casa and Umbrel Os arent really made for NAS applications.... for a solution that doesnt need much knowledge or maintenance Unraid is the better and easy option. For me the pirce of Unraid makes it not so appealing as i dont have that high of an income. True Nas is really robust and great but has a lot of things that need to be learned in order tzo make it function well.
Would be interested to hear your thoughts on open media vault as well with this sort of comparison. Been using it a while but i notice truenas or unraid seem to be preferred.
tnx bro
The reason I went with unraid was because I can mix\match different size HDDs. Very easy to upgrade to larger HDDs without replacing all exist drives at once.
In unraid you can create ZFS pools and snapshot/replicate to another Unraid ZFS pool. You can put your containers and VM's in ZFS pools and snap/replicate those too.
Not a bad comparison but you might have started out with the fact that you have years of time invested in Truenas and maybe a month in Unraid, at least that is what it looks like from your other videos. As someone that has working the industry for as long as raid has existed I have one big reason to use
Unraid. A raid array can handle x disk failures, as can an Unraid array, but in raid, x + 1 means 100% data loss, with Unraid all the unaffected disks still retain all the data that is easily usable. Also for a home user the ability to spin down unused drive not only saves power but saves wear on the drives.
Good thing I bought my Unraid license before those changes.
I use unraid Windows 11 vm as a primary pc. I passed through all periperals and gpu. I works almost like bare pc.
I still prefer the true DIY approach.
Unraid uses btrfs as the base filesystem but it uses it's own Software RAID solution which is mostly a glorified fork of LVM, it's also Slackware based.
they use XFS, and now support ZFS pools
Just recycled some parts to make my first NAS over the weekend, been watching thousands of videos of truenas vs unraid, still can't make up my mind jfc...
I know I’ve said it before but you somehow never fail to read my mind. Or maybe the other way around. I’m on unraid and looking to explore my options and what are the odds you literally compared the two, two weeks ago🤯
stay on unraid
I like Unraid for the ease of creating a all in one Server/Workstation. I pass through a GPU, SSD, and USB card to a VM and I have one box to use as my PC and also a nice ZFS NAS system for serving movies, home security, cloud storage, ad blocking, password manager, and Minecraft server.
Data expansions is pretty much the main reason I am sticking with unraid. I am getting full on current storage? Pop down to the local electronics shop, buy a hard drive, pop it in.
I still feel like I would prefer TrueNAS over unraid. The unraid licensing process is a pain. Also have mixed feelings on the tiers and cost of unraid. TrueNAS gives me more flexibility to tinker and upgrade as I see fit. One thing I would like to see is a NAS operating system that I can just throw a bunch of random drives in and dynamically change the pool. Sounds like unraid can do that for the most part but I want something with less caveats.
You should have a metric about learning curve and install hassle.
TrueNAS is usually chosen for user like me who downscale my hassle from bare metal Linux.
Whereas Unraid is chosen for those who upscale their hassle from AIO NAS boxes.
I was going to use TrueNas Scale, but vs Core I see Scale is a work in progress, some features are missing and it hasn't, apparently, been optimised liked Core. Simple things, which I can do on Synology, like enabling and forcing SMB encryption, and setting the minimum version to 3, cannot be done in the UI - I need to set those. So I'm now looking at Unraid. I don't get why Scale doesn't have this in the UI.
Before the price changes I’d say unraid but now if I had to choose I’d go with truenas
Saying iscsi isn't available on unraid is like saying 'insert any feature here' isn't installed by default on 'insert Linux distro here'. It's literally a one button install. Same with snapshots, appdata backup, intel GPU top, or the hundreds of easily viewable and installable plugins available.
You put this big emphasis on snapshotting appdata for some reason, even though it's so small you can use the appdata backup. You could have installed appdata on zfs if you were so concerned. But you know what happens when appdata goes away? Nothing really, the system will recreate it for you. And when you go to the store it shows what you had installed previously. Just download your apps again, nothing lost.
VMS can be installed on zfs and can be snapshotted. If you don't want to install the one click install for gui then you can do it from terminal.
And not sure your issue with hardware passthrough. I have it setup easily.
Name one OS that you stop at default install and don't setup for you personal needs? Seriously, if you had spent 10 minutes looking at a video on unraids most popular plugins you could get rid of 99% of your complaints.
I like that unRaid is on USB and not tied to hardware. I can't count how many times I've moved it to to other systems. And the best part? Not wasting valuable disks for storage to an OS. Entire OS can be saved to backup or cloud in just a minute.
Last is electricity. I have zfs on 6 ssd's, and bulk storage on 12 mechanical. They all spin down and only access one disk when needed. That saves a lot on electricity and noise.
Thanks, while I respect your opinion. I agree that there are many plugins and apps to do a million different things (or the same thing a million different ways) but I think that a majority if this should be included in the product. That's my take, from a product perspective. As yes, I spent more than 10 minutes, more like 300+ hours with Unraid over the last few months, over 60 alone while writing this video. The cache drive is a great idea for saving electricity and something that would be great if they highlighted this as a feature.
Not sure why multiple people are taking about spinning drives down, I guess unless you are in Europe. Drives should be spinning 24/7 for maximum lifespan, access and performance.
@@TechnoTim Respect your opinion too, but not following common procedures and setting it up correctly from the start for any os is a disservice to your viewers. Like saying if something goes wrong, no way to restore data, no way to take snapshots of appdata (which you don't need to do, but can). Again if you don't do appdata backup, you just redownload. But yet you spent a lot of time and praise on all the steps needed to add apps to trunas (which isn't included in product). Or to say there is no way to do custom feeds in store (there is).
@@wojtek-33 Jea but if you life in Europe this is the singel biggest reason for Unraid for a lot of People. I have a 130 Tb Unraid System and a 170 Tb TrunasScale system.
But i use Truenas just for Backups. My Unraid run 24/7 but of course with spinn down. If i would let the drives spinn all the time it would coste me easy over $400 a year just to let the drives on.
Same with GPU vs iGPU and so on. Every 100W you have running 24/7 cost you about $350 a year.
@@wojtek-33 that's wrong with unraid array for a home user
One question - How long have you been using Unraid for? Compared to TrueNAS
the time it takes to wach (Spaceinvader One) videos LOL
Unraid spin up less disk when access which is good for me
It still quick enough for 2.5G network connection
Hi Refering to what you are saying at 12:24min I am sorry but you can take snapshots of your dockers or backup them
Can't go with unraid because the value just isn't there. They are charging a premium for features that might come in a future release, not to mention the "not a subscription" subscription. Not to mention saying the increase was to focus on development and not advertising then immediately launching a paid affiliate program. For Truenas, it is just not intuitive for someone new who doesn't understand the 10 different kinds of cache and can't afford huge hdd's from the jump. What did it for me was having movies on an external disk that I could not feed into plex, or at least figure out how to do it. If there was a system that was a combination of the two I would be on it.
The premium is easily paid for by repurposing drives. URs target audience is someone growing into a full NAS, where TrueNAS is for someone building a (near)enterprise solution. If you already have an external or 3, Unraid is the way to go.
What I really need to know is this. Which has the least memory requirements? Trying to reuse an old server that is hard coded at a 2GB limit. Whatever I chose had to fit within that.
unraid is your way, treuenas by default requires 1GB ram per 1TB data
With unraid you can make snapshots of your appdata by ensuring the disk with appdata on it is formatted with a file system that supports snapshots such as btrfs or zfs. Of course it’s then best practice to send that snapshot to another disk in the array that also uses that same file system.
You can backup the USB drive for unraid, It doesnt make it perfect, but it does make it better, you are not limited to that one single usb drive.
11:46 there is option in unraid to add your own repo :) its on te left
I started with TrueNAS Core and bounced off because of bhyve, then i settled on Unraid for last couple years. I'm lucky one with 1-time payment for license and i can upgrade it (i use Plus one for now). I really like how TrueNAS Scale looks and works, but it's better for me to just add single drive to whole array if i need to expand :)
Edit: I hope there will be second part for this video as "Community Best NAS" or something.
Thanks for this! I'd be interesting to see a similar comparison between these two and openmediavault
I think you have reached the pinnacle of beardness! Looks good, don't change it! :D
I appreciate the comparison.
where to buy your board to connect many SATA SSD please?
if know pls mention me