It's seriously one of the most underrated - this channel is just like Linux, it's highly competent, but for some reason not as popular as it ought to be. Wendell is definitely helping change that, though. Real ambassador for good software. Would be nice if he was more of a proponent of Libre software, though. Looking at it more in depth, etc.
@@linkdude64 Wendell worked or works in the Enterprise, so it's no wonder he is ok with both proprietary and free software, as he probably had to use both. And he is pushing for free software a lot, but sometimes, free software is just not there yet, like it's the case for ESXi. Just look at some of Wendell's video about Synology NAS and how easy it is to integrate with VMWare. Just get the plugin and poof, done, basically. VMWare still has the most support and the most easy to find tech guys that know how to use it. I also doubt it won't be easy to learn. There are a lot of competing solutions, I think Proxmox is the closest to VMWare, but it's "janky" compared to VMWare, because you need to do things manually. I do prefer the manual stuff for the most part. Another thing is vCloud, to which there are competing solutions, like OpenNebula and OpenStack. I didn't use OpenStack, but I heard it is a big mess and beside the need to read a lot of documentation, it's also pretty buggy, so you're better off buying a vendor solution of OpenStack to solve some of the bugginess, but then you get into proprietary stuff and vendor lock-in. OpenNebula is pretty neat, but I had a lot of bugs with it, to the point I migrated 7 hosts one by one to Proxmox, with more than 200 VMs.
Biky why not share how you did that migration on TH-cam a forum or a blog? It would be interesting insight for those who want to learn. I’m sure it would get enough views.
I don't really know VERY much about these setups, but I'm using UNRAID, and one thing that got me there, is the ability to add drives, whenever I need more space. I am using it as a Home Media Server, and Storage Solution. I also run dockers like Emby, Radarr, Sonarr, Home Assistant, even my Ubiquiti UniFi OS and more. I'm loving this A LOT. Not being able to pay up front for all the space I might need in the future UNRAID seemed like a good solution. I even started this on a SoC E350 motherboard I had laying around, with 2GBs of RAM and a single HDD. Without ever needing to start again, I've upgraded my server with stuff like a Supermicro Motherboard, Xeon CPU, ECC RAM, and a lot more drives, cache SSDs etc. Unraid is like hardware agnostic which I LOVE. PS. For a guy that has never done anything like this, I can tell you, it's easy enough for anyone to get started.
@@n0ex I've heard that some other setups, can be a lot faster, but hey, you can't have EVERYTHING ! :D In MY specific case, Unraid is almost EXACTLY what I need !!!
I knew Level1Techs had done a video about this! Thanks. I'm building a NAS right now and I'm torn between unRAID and FreeNAS. I'm going for consumer-grade hardware so I'm leaning towards unRAID. Because of this, and because the FreeNAS forum seems to be more "RTFM, your hardware sucks", and less "let me help you".
This FreeNAS vs Unraid is a rabbit hole debate. They are both good solutions they are just different solutions. For my home setup I went with unraid even though I know on paper ZFS is superior.
Simon TV but in the video. Didn’t he say you can do ZFS on unRAID and that’s what he did for Gaming Nexus? I’m confused. Talks too fast and mumbles for a noob. Isn’t it freeNAS vs unRAID and not XFS vs unRAID because they can be done on both? And does XFS on unRAID make use of ECC. He didn’t mention that. Headaches.
Thanks for this video. It was essentially a summary of what I already knew about the two products, but to hear it from you guys rather than a blog somewhere really gives it a bit more credence. Now I just have to decide if I'm going to do FreeNAS or Unraid...
I was unable to decide this myself. So I am attempting to roll my own using Ubuntu 19.10 with the ZFS based install. So far I have everything up and running with dockers. So far so good.
@@HellTriX basically I'm down to whether I want to be able to add drives at random or not. I plan to have backup, so while data integrity is important, I will be set in case something happens.
@@JohnDoe-gs1cb Yeah, It's not super simple as I have to compile and build zfs for linux on ubuntu 20.10 using the source. But, I have zfs up and running for my needs.
Have run unRAID on an HP Proliant for YEARS now and it's been great. I keep adding disks to it and it keeps chugging right along. Up to ~42TB of parity protected storage! Love it!! Highly recommended!!
It would be really nice if you could do a video/guide on what in your opinion is the best homeserver setup based on ease of use, performance and maintenance
Best of the best! Keep up the great work, guys. I've subscribed. Wish I had found you much earlier. BTW, Shadow Copy is available in Windows 10 Pro. To use this feature, go to Services, then scroll down to Volume Shadow Copy and change the Startup from Disabled to Automatic or Manual. I chose Automatic. The service starts and you're good to go.
FreeNAS experience: try and scratch your head on how it works, go to forum, get scolded or looked down to for being a noob Unraid experience: go through pretty much everything without much help as it's very easy to use, go to forums to see what else you could do, get amazing advice and friendly help from a great community understanding that people have to start somewhere...
@@meptalon what you described sounds like on freenas forums there was a complete misunderstanding between you and people who showed up in your thread. First you failed to find a solution to own problem by researching what's already known (and I bet that it was a known issue and it was possible to avoid that misunderstanding altogether), then you failed to get help and after couple such confusions you left freenas in hope that it would be easier in other ecosystem -> unraid. But the thing is that it is not easier, but there are more less educated people that manage to support each other and you get impression that 1st community was more hostile than this one..
I don't spend much time there, but I never seen people on freenas forums "get scolded or looked down to for being a noob" when I looked up my own issues. makes me wanna ask for link to your thread were it really happened.
"I love FreeNAS and ZFS, but I know in my heart of hearts that Unraid is better for home users. But I don't want to admit that so I'll talk around it and bring up a bunch of other products that we really shouldn't be talking about for home users."
this is so true, and if I made a video I think I would fall into the same trap. The problem is that ZFS, BSD, and jails are technologically superior so a geek has a hard time giving up on them. Linux, docker, and the rest has more popularity which is far better for a home user. Even in watching this video I know I should go with UnRaid but that ZFS/BSD/Jail goodness tho!
Freenas: A storage software for those who want a career learning how to use freenas Unraid: the system you end up buying and liking after you wasted weeks trying to figure out why freenas broke and you couldn’t fix it.
the thing wont't work if you are not willing to make effort to configure it. ofc it will eventually fail. Especially true in case of ZFS, which is unforgiving enterprise-level difficulty file system.
Leeroy my point is the people who use this for home use shouldn’t waste their time with freenas. It breaks and you’re spending hours in the forums trying to figure out what file you need to edit, or what file you need to patch to fix the problem. I’m other words, unless you have extensive Linux knowledge and/or time, and need maximum disk performance, unraid is way better. I have three 40+ TB unraid installations (one home and one at my office) and they’re all together less headache than the one freenas one I have, especially when a drive fails. Also, Try GPU Passthrough on freenas :)
@@lazerusmfh I mean everyone's experience is different. My freenas setup has been running great for the past 4 years now. It is "joined" to my domain, LDAP is working well. The shares I have are assigned to groups within my AD domain so permissions are a breeze. I have gone through a raidz expansion (just replaces all my drives with bigger ones and expanding the pool) that was fairly painless. I have 4 jails running 2 vm's and a docker contrainer running. I have a 10Gbe NIC and my drivers are fast enough to saturate it. I haven't needed GPU passthrough so I can't speak on that.
I didn't think freenas was hard to get up and running. I've been running it for probably 8 or 9 years now. I never took any it classes or anything besides pascal in the 90s. I just know how to read
Fully respect that. I'm a power user not a system admin so FreeNAS is well over my head.. The community was also 0 help, expect to get rinsed for not reading/understanding the wiki before posting. Unraid is perfect for me plenty of good video tutorials(spaceinvader one) and the forum is a wealth of information.
On the docker container "not starting after reboot", I beg to differ, it works just fine here (and did on older versions and still works on the latest one). I can even choose which dockers always run at boot and which ones don't. Not sure why or how you did, but it's not about Unraid not supporting proper docker start at boot time.
Same here, running Unraid for over 9 years now (still from the same 2GB USB drive it came on lol) and used docker from when it was available. I never had problems with docker not starting, or the array not starting (only when there's something wrong with a disk). Array starts, shares are mounted, Docker starts and then the individual dockers start.
If I were to wager a guess, I'd say shoehorning in ZFS may have throwing the supported boot up routine out of whack. But yes, unless you do something crazy, your dockers should absolutely start on boot.
@@JohnDoe-gs1cb I've lost several hard drives in the past 10 years and I could always recover from parity. Only once I lost some data when I didn't follow the right procedure to replace a failed disk. But that was my own fault.
I eventually settled on using unRAID because I started out with an array of mismatched drives. I bought a bigger parity drive on sale and started from there. The advantage for me is that the application support via docker does everything I needed that I was setting up manually with command line Linux: Plex, sabnzbd, Transmission, Steam game servers, backup clients, BTSync, etc. I’ve had a 4 TB drive fail and the server continued to work via emulation, added a new drive of a different size, and recovered fully.
Never tried ZFS, but on the BTRFS I can give an input on the raid 1, 0 and 10, it saved me more times that I would like to admit. I've had disk died on me, raid 10, converted to raid 1 removed a drive completely, bad sectors and... the data is all there, I mean the survivability and resilience of btrfs on RAID 1 and 10, is so good that it's frightening, you can convert the array to practically anything while you have stuff smashing on the hard drive (I mean production stuff... pls dont kill me). Also it is natively supported by docker and LXD for snapshot and subvolumes.
I'd like to point out that Docker support on FreeNAS can be a big PITA to setup, mainly due to the non-standard requirement of Rancher. Unraid on the other hand comes with the Docker Engine by default, and the GUI definitely works well with it.
Great comparison! I'd love to see you do a more in-depth review/comparison with proxmox as well. I'm in a situation where I already have a low power i3 unraid NAS that I've been using for a couple of years. I recently built a rackmount dual xeon server with 12 hotswap bays and bought 6 x 500GB SSDs. I'm not sure if I should consolidate the unraid nas into the new, more powerful server, or just keep these things separate. I do like running dockers, but I also need to spin up VMs often.
IMHO for home users unRAID is the best option simply because you can mix and match HDDs pretty much any way you want (parity disk needs to be the largest in the system but that is the only rule), with FreeNAS last time i checked you need an array of same sized drives and once it is running you can't change anything anymore after the fact, with unRAID i recently even removed a drive from my Array. Small 1TB disk finally died, i just moved the data in emulated mode to another disk that had free space with the unbalance plugin, then just redid the parity disk over night and voila its back up and running with one old disk less, no data lost. The other thing is, as a home user i got the System in my room, i don't have a dedicated server room (yet *cough* maybe one day) point being every HDD that spins makes noise, uses power, ZFS relies on the server running 24/7 356 days a week, the HDDs never spin down, i got called names in the FreeNAS sub-reddit (bunch of fainbois!) because i dared to ask if it could do that. unRAID spins down HDDs after being 15 minutes idle (well you can set it up any way you want), point being my unRAID Server, while idle is whisper quiet.
Regarding the Docker IP binding in Unraid, it is actually possible using the GUI alone, but it requires dedicating a single NIC to Docker/the IP in question.
I started with UnRAID, but recently just set up a virtualized FreeNAS install in my ESXI 6.7 host. The main thing I switched to FreeNAS for is ZFS, better virtualization, and I found that my Plex works better on FreeNAS that on UnRAID. I love the idea of UnRAID and the forever expansion of storage, but honestly if you use mirrors in FreeNAS, you're just buying 2 drives instead of 1 and you're getting multiple drive performance when you add to that pool. I'm still deciding what I wanna do with my Unraid box. I toyed with the idea of Proxmox and setting up some ZFS shares, or possibly virtualizing another FreeNAS install for replication. ClonOS looks pretty neat! I may give it a try. As always, keep the good content coming. You're a freakin' IT guru.
>you're just buying 2 drives instead of 1 and you're getting multiple drive performance when you add to that pool moreover, keep the pools separate and do not compromise overall reliability.
I think what splits the community is exactly what you said, FreeNAS is a lot more like enterprise products which will appeal to some people, unraid is more user friendly which equally will appeal to others. Overall whichever you prefer is best for you, I see people argue over it but if you can do what you want to on either one then who cares...
I used FreeNAS but had trouble getting a VM to work reliably. Probably my shortcoming. I then gave ProxMox a try and it's been working great for almost a year. I use it as a NAS using ZFS and have been very happy with it.
Now we just need to figure out how to mount a ZFS pool as a drive in Unraid's array. Currently considering using hardware raid to make use of two dozen 500GB 15k RPM drives I have sitting around.
I was having an issue trying to figure out what I'd use for my newly built NAS. UnRaid is cool and all but realized I didn't want to pay knowing that at some point I'll have more than 6 storage devices added. So I went with FreeNas!
A sponsor says what ! ....Keep on growin. I require more content :) Also if you roll your own NAS. Dont give it a public facing IP so you can be lazy on patching and admin. Us a VPN only to access your local network. That way its only your local networks and getting hacked is so much harder. Dont give your NAS an internet facing IP!
yeah, instead of a NAS I do Nextcloud (ofc public) and ssh is only reachable from homenetwork (by firewall rule) I actually won't even give it an open port 80 because f*** http these days, https all the way
@@HulksterHogan be aware, there is currently a ransomware attack targeting NextCloud installations called "NextCry". If you don't protect your installation with the proper configuration, you may be at risk as most long standing installations are.
@@00Klingon The problem was actually a reported bug in NGINX/PHP-FPM, not NextCloud itself. NextCloud pushed messages via e-mail, forum, and admin console on NextCloud web interface for people to update, and so far there have only been two known victims, neither of which paid the hacker: nextcloud.com/blog/nextcry-or-how-a-hacker-tried-to-exploit-a-nginx-issue-with-2-nextcloud-servers-out-of-300-000-hit-and-no-payout/
Great video man! You are the first channel I've found on youtube that actually breaks this stuff down into layman's terms. Keep making these videos please!
Man you’ve got to try XCP-ng with the open Xen Orchestra web management. Getting familiar with xenserver commands takes a bit, but the payoff being able to use this FOSS but enterprise-grade L1 hypervisor is worth it
I just want a hypervisor with the awesomeness of esxi, stability of bsd, and a file system using zfs, that also supports HA, is completely free, and wrapped in a well working GUI. So i use esxi with freenas as a vm. clonOS looks super cool.
Is there anyway to setup unraid on freenas ? 🤔 i don’t want to pay for license fees . I want to setup just like unraid on freenas . I am not interested on zfs as i will be limited for upgrade option. Mostly i will use the NAS for home backup purposes and will run few docker container for dns blocking etc . Is it possible ?
The windows 10 backup is so broken. I literally said that on microsoft's own forum and 3 people replied and said yeah it's broke just use 3rd party software. Like what are you kidding me.
Windows built in backup has always been an afterthought, even on servers. It's a last ditch option at best, no one in the IT world relies on windows backups, home market should be the same
So much agree with that - Proxmox sits very nicely in the space - for a NAS + VM (with good passthrough support). I know it is a bit more VM and container focused, but ZFS OOB... So for a case like Gamers Nexus, I would neither use FreeNAS (where VM is bolted on), nor Unraid - which isn't Open Source - and having to bolt on ZFS yourself is just not the way to go.... (and autostart VMs and containers works ;)
@@JohnDoe-gs1cb The boring answer is (as always) - it depends.... If you only have one box, then I would much prefer Proxmox (with ZFS), and then some system on top to yield services like backup and sharing... FreeNAS could be used, but it is intended for managing its own disks (and here it definitely shouldn't) - so perhaps other products could be considered for the role of managing storage... But it is very much possible to run everything as a WM or a container on a single Proxmox server - Including a PfSense that never lacks access to power :) - TrueNAS/FreeNAS or services like Nextcloud... Or even Xpenology..
Hello, you talk in this vid about tests of BTRFS Raid 5/6, the only thing I found regarding Raid BTRFS on your YT channel or blog was about RAID 1. Did you misspoke in this vid? If not, where can I found the blog post/vid about it if there is one?
Thanks for the Video, Your explanations and reasoning for choices are valuable to help me choose which to use for what purpose. Keep up the great work! Video series that show the step by step process of your guides for creating these vm/dockers/jails for the noobs among your community. There are not a lot of video guide that are up to date how-to's on TH-cam, so great opportunity for the channel to create content for the inexperienced Home lab community members. I look forward to more Videos Along this subject matter. Great content keep it up!
I have the tower version of that case. Can you put up a parts list that you used to connect the disk shelf including the disk shelf part? I've been thinking about expanding and rather than trial and error, I willl go with what someone has already tried and worked.
There is an autostart option for docker containers in the GUI...maybe because the containers were setup via command line they didn't appear there? It works really well I have several containers start up after the array and it works great (no command line needed). Either way there is an already built community docker container for steamcache with the dns server built in so I'm not sure why you didn't just use that. Pre-configured you just setup some of the variables like the IP address and like I said it comes with steamcache and dns together in the same container. Look up Spaceinvaderone's youtube channel for unraid projects. I think you opinion might be more positive once you see what he's done. Plus your trancoding project is something he's already setup (automated even) for downloaded torrents. It could easily be adapted to Steve's workflow considering it's basically just setting up a watched folder. th-cam.com/video/NA_sO3rH2mU/w-d-xo.html
Btw I should mention THANK YOU for the zfs tutorial. Unraid+ZFS is freaking amazing! I've been testing it this month..ish and it's been bulletproof. Thank you for adding to the Unraid community!
Been running freenas at home for about three years now. Zero issue with it. Storage upgrades are pretty simple with ZFS. I have added one more three drive VDEV so far. Went smooth. Only drawback to this is that the old data is not redistributed between the VDEVs after adding one.
Great video. I would love to see and help with a proxmox video. you should have said cockpit instead of webmin for virtual machines. You can do all the networking and storage stuff from the webui. You can do basic VM creation and configuration in the cockpit ui but do things pci passthrough or managing lvm storage you need virt-manager or use the virsh scripts
hey, so we are trying to make a lab environment for students of our college so that every student can access his/her designated Ubuntu virtual machine through the web browser it every virtual machine should be a clone of each, meaning every student should get a VM with same specifications, we are working on a backend for the web site but how do make a server which can make of run at least 30 VMs at a time which can be accessed from any place in the world. I hope I made this clear.
I've used storage spaces from M1cr0$0ft which is quite similar to all this because I did not like the freenas limitations around adding drives. Perhaps I will move to unraid.
Props for running straight up ZFS on Linux rather than unraid or Freenas. Both have their place, but I feel like they’re training wheels. Training wheels that are capable and actually fine for most people, but running vanilla ZFS allows you to do anything you can do on Linux without waiting for unraid or Freenas to get a plug-in working or for them to update versions.
coming from a synology nas using shr-1 btrfs and thinking of building a unRAID server. What type of array do you think would be best for a plex server/downloader?
Speaking of Proxmox, a cool video idea might be to demonstrate a 3-node Proxmox/Ceph cluster, perhaps using three dual-port 100 Gbps Mellanox cards off eBay to form a three-way mesh/crossover network for their replication and sync. (Yes, scalability, but bang for the buck at this level of deployment is hard to beat.)
Have you tried Ceph as a storage backend? A lot of enterprise things I've looked at recently have been using that as a distributed block store and file system.
Should you get unraid or just use centos or other linux distro? I mean, you probably already need a RAID card anyways if you have more than 6 or 8 drives.. That raid card can also do raid right?
if your using bleeding edge and something isn't broken then your clearly not doing enough with it to actually need it to begin with. security updates usually don't cause many issues but library and kernel updates 100% have the ability to cause WW3.
Expanding ZFS pools is one of those things you plan for. For instance, I have a 6-drive box I will be rebuilding soon, fully populated with big drives now, but when I say big I mean "big" - ish. My next setup will start with one pool of one mirror, out of two huge drives (12+12TB, or bigger). It can then be expanded by adding more vdevs to the pool. Probably will be in the form of another mirror of 12+12. It's not as flexible perhaps but it's damned solid and the data is checksummed. Unraid is fine for what it is, but I'm not giving up ZFS. ZFS is front and center in FreeNAS or XigmaNAS (I kind of like the latter, it's the direct continuation of the original FreeNAS before Ix got the name) and it's not a plugin based second class citizen.
For the average home user, ZFS is a huge overhead to learn and support. You do not need to run ZFS on unRaid (unless you are that way inclined). To add extra storage on unRaid. Stop the server, plug in hard drive (any size, but less than the parity -you can have two parity drives), power on and format it. That's all.
You and your videos are great and I appreciate the knowledge dump. I did notice an inaccuracy at 17:34. You called H.265/HEVC a "lossless transcode", but that is a lossy codec. I think you meant a "visually lossless transcode".
Hey, glad you guys got a sponsor spot. You are the best tech channel on the web.
Sponsors are great, but I don’t get why companies are still advertising LGA115x stuff.
@@1armbiker Because that's all Intel has right now on 14nm+++++++++++
It's seriously one of the most underrated - this channel is just like Linux, it's highly competent, but for some reason not as popular as it ought to be. Wendell is definitely helping change that, though. Real ambassador for good software. Would be nice if he was more of a proponent of Libre software, though. Looking at it more in depth, etc.
@@linkdude64 Wendell worked or works in the Enterprise, so it's no wonder he is ok with both proprietary and free software, as he probably had to use both. And he is pushing for free software a lot, but sometimes, free software is just not there yet, like it's the case for ESXi. Just look at some of Wendell's video about Synology NAS and how easy it is to integrate with VMWare. Just get the plugin and poof, done, basically.
VMWare still has the most support and the most easy to find tech guys that know how to use it. I also doubt it won't be easy to learn. There are a lot of competing solutions, I think Proxmox is the closest to VMWare, but it's "janky" compared to VMWare, because you need to do things manually. I do prefer the manual stuff for the most part.
Another thing is vCloud, to which there are competing solutions, like OpenNebula and OpenStack. I didn't use OpenStack, but I heard it is a big mess and beside the need to read a lot of documentation, it's also pretty buggy, so you're better off buying a vendor solution of OpenStack to solve some of the bugginess, but then you get into proprietary stuff and vendor lock-in. OpenNebula is pretty neat, but I had a lot of bugs with it, to the point I migrated 7 hosts one by one to Proxmox, with more than 200 VMs.
Biky why not share how you did that migration on TH-cam a forum or a blog? It would be interesting insight for those who want to learn. I’m sure it would get enough views.
I don't really know VERY much about these setups, but I'm using UNRAID, and one thing that got me there, is the ability to add drives, whenever I need more space.
I am using it as a Home Media Server, and Storage Solution.
I also run dockers like Emby, Radarr, Sonarr, Home Assistant, even my Ubiquiti UniFi OS and more. I'm loving this A LOT.
Not being able to pay up front for all the space I might need in the future UNRAID seemed like a good solution.
I even started this on a SoC E350 motherboard I had laying around, with 2GBs of RAM and a single HDD.
Without ever needing to start again, I've upgraded my server with stuff like a Supermicro Motherboard, Xeon CPU, ECC RAM, and a lot more drives, cache SSDs etc.
Unraid is like hardware agnostic which I LOVE.
PS. For a guy that has never done anything like this, I can tell you, it's easy enough for anyone to get started.
@@n0ex I've heard that some other setups, can be a lot faster, but hey, you can't have EVERYTHING ! :D
In MY specific case, Unraid is almost EXACTLY what I need !!!
Hey Wendell... could you revisit this video?
A LOT has changed in the last 2 years... I guess!
Thanks!!
I was actually building a NAS storage server *right now* and was wondering this. Your video is going to be what I base my decision on.
Thank you! :)
We need an updated video, truenas scale vs unraid
I knew Level1Techs had done a video about this! Thanks. I'm building a NAS right now and I'm torn between unRAID and FreeNAS. I'm going for consumer-grade hardware so I'm leaning towards unRAID. Because of this, and because the FreeNAS forum seems to be more "RTFM, your hardware sucks", and less "let me help you".
I feel like I am leaving with more questions than I entered....
This FreeNAS vs Unraid is a rabbit hole debate. They are both good solutions they are just different solutions. For my home setup I went with unraid even though I know on paper ZFS is superior.
welcome to the world of storage ;)
@Simon TV what filesystem did you go with unraid? XFS, BTRFS?
Simon TV but in the video. Didn’t he say you can do ZFS on unRAID and that’s what he did for Gaming Nexus? I’m confused. Talks too fast and mumbles for a noob. Isn’t it freeNAS vs unRAID and not XFS vs unRAID because they can be done on both? And does XFS on unRAID make use of ECC. He didn’t mention that. Headaches.
I ... missed the whole grudge match part. Where's the failure analysis...
Cool. Nice overview of options for when I eventually get around to setting up a home server again.
Thanks for this video. It was essentially a summary of what I already knew about the two products, but to hear it from you guys rather than a blog somewhere really gives it a bit more credence.
Now I just have to decide if I'm going to do FreeNAS or Unraid...
I was unable to decide this myself. So I am attempting to roll my own using Ubuntu 19.10 with the ZFS based install. So far I have everything up and running with dockers. So far so good.
@@HellTriX basically I'm down to whether I want to be able to add drives at random or not. I plan to have backup, so while data integrity is important, I will be set in case something happens.
Thanks for your high-quality content Wendell. I really enjoy watching your videos, they're always very informative and interesting.
Docker containers to do what? What do docker containers have to do with network attached storage?
After I saw your and Steve's video I swapped from ZFS + Ubuntu desktop to ZFS + Unraid. I'm really happy with it. Thanks!
If my Ubuntu + zfs doesn't work out for some reason. I will swap to Unraid + zfs myself. :)
@@HellTriX it's working?
@@JohnDoe-gs1cb Yeah, It's not super simple as I have to compile and build zfs for linux on ubuntu 20.10 using the source. But, I have zfs up and running for my needs.
"... as far as I could throw Steve Ballmer" - I wonder if he rolls...
.... the head definitely does.
Steve Balmer:
*Snorts 20 lines*
*punches hole in wall*
"I LOVE THIS COMPANY YEAH"
*proceeds to blackout on stage*
Have run unRAID on an HP Proliant for YEARS now and it's been great. I keep adding disks to it and it keeps chugging right along. Up to ~42TB of parity protected storage! Love it!! Highly recommended!!
It would be really nice if you could do a video/guide on what in your opinion is the best homeserver setup based on ease of use, performance and maintenance
Best of the best! Keep up the great work, guys. I've subscribed. Wish I had found you much earlier. BTW, Shadow Copy is available in Windows 10 Pro. To use this feature, go to Services, then scroll down to Volume Shadow Copy and change the Startup from Disabled to Automatic or Manual. I chose Automatic. The service starts and you're good to go.
You want me to sum up the FreeNAS user experience? *Permission error
FreeNAS experience: try and scratch your head on how it works, go to forum, get scolded or looked down to for being a noob
Unraid experience: go through pretty much everything without much help as it's very easy to use, go to forums to see what else you could do, get amazing advice and friendly help from a great community understanding that people have to start somewhere...
@@meptalon what you described sounds like on freenas forums there was a complete misunderstanding between you and people who showed up in your thread. First you failed to find a solution to own problem by researching what's already known (and I bet that it was a known issue and it was possible to avoid that misunderstanding altogether), then you failed to get help and after couple such confusions you left freenas in hope that it would be easier in other ecosystem -> unraid. But the thing is that it is not easier, but there are more less educated people that manage to support each other and you get impression that 1st community was more hostile than this one..
I don't spend much time there, but I never seen people on freenas forums "get scolded or looked down to for being a noob" when I looked up my own issues. makes me wanna ask for link to your thread were it really happened.
@@Mr.Leeroy you obviously haven't had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with Cyberjock I see
@@meptalon you must be one of those people that gets offended when they get told they are doing something wrong
or just an unraid shill lol
"I love FreeNAS and ZFS, but I know in my heart of hearts that Unraid is better for home users. But I don't want to admit that so I'll talk around it and bring up a bunch of other products that we really shouldn't be talking about for home users."
this is so true, and if I made a video I think I would fall into the same trap. The problem is that ZFS, BSD, and jails are technologically superior so a geek has a hard time giving up on them. Linux, docker, and the rest has more popularity which is far better for a home user.
Even in watching this video I know I should go with UnRaid but that ZFS/BSD/Jail goodness tho!
Freenas: A storage software for those who want a career learning how to use freenas
Unraid: the system you end up buying and liking after you wasted weeks trying to figure out why freenas broke and you couldn’t fix it.
Lol I have enjoyed my time learning BSD to keep my freenas system running haha.
the thing wont't work if you are not willing to make effort to configure it. ofc it will eventually fail. Especially true in case of ZFS, which is unforgiving enterprise-level difficulty file system.
Leeroy my point is the people who use this for home use shouldn’t waste their time with freenas. It breaks and you’re spending hours in the forums trying to figure out what file you need to edit, or what file you need to patch to fix the problem. I’m other words, unless you have extensive Linux knowledge and/or time, and need maximum disk performance, unraid is way better. I have three 40+ TB unraid installations (one home and one at my office) and they’re all together less headache than the one freenas one I have, especially when a drive fails. Also, Try GPU Passthrough on freenas :)
@@lazerusmfh I mean everyone's experience is different. My freenas setup has been running great for the past 4 years now. It is "joined" to my domain, LDAP is working well. The shares I have are assigned to groups within my AD domain so permissions are a breeze.
I have gone through a raidz expansion (just replaces all my drives with bigger ones and expanding the pool) that was fairly painless. I have 4 jails running 2 vm's and a docker contrainer running. I have a 10Gbe NIC and my drivers are fast enough to saturate it.
I haven't needed GPU passthrough so I can't speak on that.
I didn't think freenas was hard to get up and running. I've been running it for probably 8 or 9 years now. I never took any it classes or anything besides pascal in the 90s. I just know how to read
Wendell's fireside chat format is good stuff! Just need a fire in the background.
You guys, gamers nexus, Hardware Unboxed, & Tech YES City make up the best parts of the tech community.
Fully respect that. I'm a power user not a system admin so FreeNAS is well over my head.. The community was also 0 help, expect to get rinsed for not reading/understanding the wiki before posting. Unraid is perfect for me plenty of good video tutorials(spaceinvader one) and the forum is a wealth of information.
Awesome patreon just joined yesterday. Already loving it. Thanks for the helpful videos 👍
Same here! Thanks Wendell, and everyone else at Level1.
On the docker container "not starting after reboot", I beg to differ, it works just fine here (and did on older versions and still works on the latest one). I can even choose which dockers always run at boot and which ones don't. Not sure why or how you did, but it's not about Unraid not supporting proper docker start at boot time.
Same here, running Unraid for over 9 years now (still from the same 2GB USB drive it came on lol) and used docker from when it was available.
I never had problems with docker not starting, or the array not starting (only when there's something wrong with a disk). Array starts, shares are mounted, Docker starts and then the individual dockers start.
If I were to wager a guess, I'd say shoehorning in ZFS may have throwing the supported boot up routine out of whack. But yes, unless you do something crazy, your dockers should absolutely start on boot.
@@djnaffie and how is your experience after 10 years? Did you loose some file?
@@JohnDoe-gs1cb I've lost several hard drives in the past 10 years and I could always recover from parity. Only once I lost some data when I didn't follow the right procedure to replace a failed disk. But that was my own fault.
i make freenas vm on unraid, then passthrough the hdds to make pool on freenas vm. can i do that?
Was unaware of Unraid will have to check it out. Really good overview of many of the Nas VM distros.
4:27 wheres that picture from?
Ever took a look at XCP-ng and XOA?
I eventually settled on using unRAID because I started out with an array of mismatched drives. I bought a bigger parity drive on sale and started from there. The advantage for me is that the application support via docker does everything I needed that I was setting up manually with command line Linux: Plex, sabnzbd, Transmission, Steam game servers, backup clients, BTSync, etc. I’ve had a 4 TB drive fail and the server continued to work via emulation, added a new drive of a different size, and recovered fully.
Never tried ZFS, but on the BTRFS I can give an input on the raid 1, 0 and 10, it saved me more times that I would like to admit.
I've had disk died on me, raid 10, converted to raid 1 removed a drive completely, bad sectors and... the data is all there, I mean the survivability and resilience of btrfs on RAID 1 and 10, is so good that it's frightening, you can convert the array to practically anything while you have stuff smashing on the hard drive (I mean production stuff... pls dont kill me).
Also it is natively supported by docker and LXD for snapshot and subvolumes.
I'd like to point out that Docker support on FreeNAS can be a big PITA to setup, mainly due to the non-standard requirement of Rancher.
Unraid on the other hand comes with the Docker Engine by default, and the GUI definitely works well with it.
Wendell there’s a switch to autostart docker containers... no script needed.
How about FreeNAS as a VM in unRaid with passthrough PCIe Raid controller? Just to get a ZFS server + thunderbolt gaming vm in the same box.
Great comparison! I'd love to see you do a more in-depth review/comparison with proxmox as well. I'm in a situation where I already have a low power i3 unraid NAS that I've been using for a couple of years. I recently built a rackmount dual xeon server with 12 hotswap bays and bought 6 x 500GB SSDs. I'm not sure if I should consolidate the unraid nas into the new, more powerful server, or just keep these things separate. I do like running dockers, but I also need to spin up VMs often.
IMHO for home users unRAID is the best option simply because you can mix and match HDDs pretty much any way you want (parity disk needs to be the largest in the system but that is the only rule), with FreeNAS last time i checked you need an array of same sized drives and once it is running you can't change anything anymore after the fact, with unRAID i recently even removed a drive from my Array. Small 1TB disk finally died, i just moved the data in emulated mode to another disk that had free space with the unbalance plugin, then just redid the parity disk over night and voila its back up and running with one old disk less, no data lost.
The other thing is, as a home user i got the System in my room, i don't have a dedicated server room (yet *cough* maybe one day) point being every HDD that spins makes noise, uses power, ZFS relies on the server running 24/7 356 days a week, the HDDs never spin down, i got called names in the FreeNAS sub-reddit (bunch of fainbois!) because i dared to ask if it could do that.
unRAID spins down HDDs after being 15 minutes idle (well you can set it up any way you want), point being my unRAID Server, while idle is whisper quiet.
Great video. I learned that I don't need to use either to do what I want.
Do you plan to make an updated KVM/QEMU + GPU Passthrough guide?
Regarding the Docker IP binding in Unraid, it is actually possible using the GUI alone, but it requires dedicating a single NIC to Docker/the IP in question.
EXACTLY the video i was hoping for. Thanks Wendell.
l1tech: FREENAS VS UNRAID!
me: OMV!
I started with UnRAID, but recently just set up a virtualized FreeNAS install in my ESXI 6.7 host. The main thing I switched to FreeNAS for is ZFS, better virtualization, and I found that my Plex works better on FreeNAS that on UnRAID. I love the idea of UnRAID and the forever expansion of storage, but honestly if you use mirrors in FreeNAS, you're just buying 2 drives instead of 1 and you're getting multiple drive performance when you add to that pool.
I'm still deciding what I wanna do with my Unraid box. I toyed with the idea of Proxmox and setting up some ZFS shares, or possibly virtualizing another FreeNAS install for replication. ClonOS looks pretty neat! I may give it a try.
As always, keep the good content coming. You're a freakin' IT guru.
>you're just buying 2 drives instead of 1 and you're getting multiple drive performance when you add to that pool
moreover, keep the pools separate and do not compromise overall reliability.
Ever consider trying Open Media Vault?
I think what splits the community is exactly what you said, FreeNAS is a lot more like enterprise products which will appeal to some people, unraid is more user friendly which equally will appeal to others. Overall whichever you prefer is best for you, I see people argue over it but if you can do what you want to on either one then who cares...
I used FreeNAS but had trouble getting a VM to work reliably. Probably my shortcoming. I then gave ProxMox a try and it's been working great for almost a year. I use it as a NAS using ZFS and have been very happy with it.
ProxMox does support ZFS without doing any back flips. It's just one of the options when you configure a storage array.
Now we just need to figure out how to mount a ZFS pool as a drive in Unraid's array. Currently considering using hardware raid to make use of two dozen 500GB 15k RPM drives I have sitting around.
You can setup ZFS on Ubuntu; which gives the best user experience. FreeNAS is for those that want a dedicated system.
Maybe with it switching over to TrueNAS Core, maybe it'll be worth making a new "2021 edition" of this video?
I was waiting for that! Thank you!
ZFS is portable to macOS too, which makes it really sweet if you are dual booting on a development laptop. ClonOS looks very interesting.
I was having an issue trying to figure out what I'd use for my newly built NAS. UnRaid is cool and all but realized I didn't want to pay knowing that at some point I'll have more than 6 storage devices added. So I went with FreeNas!
For the docker Autostart try restart=unless-stopped. The Containers should come up right after reboot.
What about OpenMediaVault?
Ok now im confused. I thought ZFS was a software raid solution that Unraid and Freenas used but from what you explain that is not the case?
3:00 I didn't expect my rack to suddenly appear. What a weird surprise xD
1:15 Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
Does the summoning work with Itanium CPUs? I have a few of those laying around.
Thing about Arsenal is, they always try and walk it in.
Love that reference, I'm gonna watch it when I go to bed
"Oh it's the home team, look at the sportsball go!"
Hit Like just for that part. 😂
A sponsor says what ! ....Keep on growin. I require more content :)
Also if you roll your own NAS. Dont give it a public facing IP so you can be lazy on patching and admin. Us a VPN only to access your local network. That way its only your local networks and getting hacked is so much harder.
Dont give your NAS an internet facing IP!
@@spiralout112 Use a VPN to reach your network :P
yeah, instead of a NAS I do Nextcloud (ofc public) and ssh is only reachable from homenetwork (by firewall rule)
I actually won't even give it an open port 80 because f*** http these days, https all the way
I just leave the task of accessing my NAS files outside of my network through the NextCloud plugin
@@HulksterHogan be aware, there is currently a ransomware attack targeting NextCloud installations called "NextCry". If you don't protect your installation with the proper configuration, you may be at risk as most long standing installations are.
@@00Klingon The problem was actually a reported bug in NGINX/PHP-FPM, not NextCloud itself. NextCloud pushed messages via e-mail, forum, and admin console on NextCloud web interface for people to update, and so far there have only been two known victims, neither of which paid the hacker: nextcloud.com/blog/nextcry-or-how-a-hacker-tried-to-exploit-a-nginx-issue-with-2-nextcloud-servers-out-of-300-000-hit-and-no-payout/
“Schizophrenic moose on roller blades” lmao
Great video man! You are the first channel I've found on youtube that actually breaks this stuff down into layman's terms. Keep making these videos please!
Man you’ve got to try XCP-ng with the open Xen Orchestra web management. Getting familiar with xenserver commands takes a bit, but the payoff being able to use this FOSS but enterprise-grade L1 hypervisor is worth it
There are so few GOOD videos of xen
I just want a hypervisor with the awesomeness of esxi, stability of bsd, and a file system using zfs, that also supports HA, is completely free, and wrapped in a well working GUI. So i use esxi with freenas as a vm. clonOS looks super cool.
ESXI isn’t really free...
Is there anyway to setup unraid on freenas ? 🤔 i don’t want to pay for license fees . I want to setup just like unraid on freenas . I am not interested on zfs as i will be limited for upgrade option. Mostly i will use the NAS for home backup purposes and will run few docker container for dns blocking etc . Is it possible ?
You dont run unRaid on freenas, just unRaid. The licence fee is very very cheap and the community is great.
Great video and explanation. I hope you know that.
Thumbs up.
Glad you liked it! ~ Editor Amber
The windows 10 backup is so broken. I literally said that on microsoft's own forum and 3 people replied and said yeah it's broke just use 3rd party software. Like what are you kidding me.
Windows built in backup has always been an afterthought, even on servers. It's a last ditch option at best, no one in the IT world relies on windows backups, home market should be the same
What's recommended for 3rd party backup?
Windows = Schizofrenik moose on rollerblades ❤
Proxmox is amazeballs. Love the multi-master cluster idea and it is solid. Been using it for years.
So much agree with that - Proxmox sits very nicely in the space - for a NAS + VM (with good passthrough support). I know it is a bit more VM and container focused, but ZFS OOB...
So for a case like Gamers Nexus, I would neither use FreeNAS (where VM is bolted on), nor Unraid - which isn't Open Source - and having to bolt on ZFS yourself is just not the way to go.... (and autostart VMs and containers works ;)
@@tonypilborg but what are the best practices? Using a VM for everything? Freenas on VM over Proxmox? Im looking to have Nextcloud too.
@@JohnDoe-gs1cb The boring answer is (as always) - it depends....
If you only have one box, then I would much prefer Proxmox (with ZFS), and then some system on top to yield services like backup and sharing... FreeNAS could be used, but it is intended for managing its own disks (and here it definitely shouldn't) - so perhaps other products could be considered for the role of managing storage... But it is very much possible to run everything as a WM or a container on a single Proxmox server - Including a PfSense that never lacks access to power :) - TrueNAS/FreeNAS or services like Nextcloud... Or even Xpenology..
Awesome video keep up the good work, you are definitely spot-on with all your details,
When he occasionally looks at the second camera, it throws me off :D
FreeNas on top of Proxmox works for me .. do the passthrough to FreeNas from Proxmox. FreeNas JUST for storage and Proxmox for the virtualisation.
Did you tried Nextcloud? I want to access to my files on freenas on "the cloud"
Hello, you talk in this vid about tests of BTRFS Raid 5/6, the only thing I found regarding Raid BTRFS on your YT channel or blog was about RAID 1. Did you misspoke in this vid? If not, where can I found the blog post/vid about it if there is one?
Been using proxmox for a few years as well. Absolutely loving it
Thanks for the Video, Your explanations and reasoning for choices are valuable to help me choose which to use for what purpose. Keep up the great work! Video series that show the step by step process of your guides for creating these vm/dockers/jails for the noobs among your community. There are not a lot of video guide that are up to date how-to's on TH-cam, so great opportunity for the channel to create content for the inexperienced Home lab community members. I look forward to more Videos Along this subject matter. Great content keep it up!
I have the tower version of that case. Can you put up a parts list that you used to connect the disk shelf including the disk shelf part? I've been thinking about expanding and rather than trial and error, I willl go with what someone has already tried and worked.
"These are aimed to a home user hardware."
**Proceeds to show a 2 powerful server builds.**
😂😂😂☠
Dockers in unriad now boot on startup fine or have done from jan when i bought it
Is hardware passthrough more stable on truenas scale being Linux based?
Enjoyed the video, thanks for sharing your knowledge!
This vid has gotten my wheels turning and given me ideas for when I set up my home server
Anyone know a good way to store lots of video files and etc
There is an autostart option for docker containers in the GUI...maybe because the containers were setup via command line they didn't appear there? It works really well I have several containers start up after the array and it works great (no command line needed).
Either way there is an already built community docker container for steamcache with the dns server built in so I'm not sure why you didn't just use that. Pre-configured you just setup some of the variables like the IP address and like I said it comes with steamcache and dns together in the same container.
Look up Spaceinvaderone's youtube channel for unraid projects. I think you opinion might be more positive once you see what he's done. Plus your trancoding project is something he's already setup (automated even) for downloaded torrents. It could easily be adapted to Steve's workflow considering it's basically just setting up a watched folder.
th-cam.com/video/NA_sO3rH2mU/w-d-xo.html
Btw I should mention THANK YOU for the zfs tutorial. Unraid+ZFS is freaking amazing! I've been testing it this month..ish and it's been bulletproof. Thank you for adding to the Unraid community!
can I install truenas or freenas on unraid server as VM and passthrough physical HDD?
I want to install the OS on Primary vDisk then passthrough physical HDD
Been running freenas at home for about three years now. Zero issue with it. Storage upgrades are pretty simple with ZFS. I have added one more three drive VDEV so far. Went smooth. Only drawback to this is that the old data is not redistributed between the VDEVs after adding one.
Great video. I would love to see and help with a proxmox video.
you should have said cockpit instead of webmin for virtual machines. You can do all the networking and storage stuff from the webui. You can do basic VM creation and configuration in the cockpit ui but do things pci passthrough or managing lvm storage you need virt-manager or use the virsh scripts
>You can do all the networking and storage stuff from the webui
Can it manage openvswitch?
hey, so we are trying to make a lab environment for students of our college so that every student can access his/her designated Ubuntu virtual machine through the web browser it every virtual machine should be a clone of each, meaning every student should get a VM with same specifications, we are working on a backend for the web site but how do make a server which can make of run at least 30 VMs at a time which can be accessed from any place in the world. I hope I made this clear.
I've used storage spaces from M1cr0$0ft which is quite similar to all this because I did not like the freenas limitations around adding drives. Perhaps I will move to unraid.
Super helfpful!
I can imagine u saying just that in ur voice.
and u dictating lord of rings after that 😂
This video helped me out so damn much. Thanks man.
Props for running straight up ZFS on Linux rather than unraid or Freenas. Both have their place, but I feel like they’re training wheels. Training wheels that are capable and actually fine for most people, but running vanilla ZFS allows you to do anything you can do on Linux without waiting for unraid or Freenas to get a plug-in working or for them to update versions.
WE NEED AN UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!! So much has changed between Unraid and TrueNas!
Very useful, good job. Thank you.
coming from a synology nas using shr-1 btrfs and thinking of building a unRAID server. What type of array do you think would be best for a plex server/downloader?
Speaking of Proxmox, a cool video idea might be to demonstrate a 3-node Proxmox/Ceph cluster, perhaps using three dual-port 100 Gbps Mellanox cards off eBay to form a three-way mesh/crossover network for their replication and sync. (Yes, scalability, but bang for the buck at this level of deployment is hard to beat.)
Have you tried Ceph as a storage backend? A lot of enterprise things I've looked at recently have been using that as a distributed block store and file system.
Ey can you do a 2022 version of this?
How do you connect the net app expansion to the system?
Should you get unraid or just use centos or other linux distro? I mean, you probably already need a RAID card anyways if you have more than 6 or 8 drives.. That raid card can also do raid right?
"Not the most stable experience, unless you run bleeding edge." 😙🎶
if your using bleeding edge and something isn't broken then your clearly not doing enough with it to actually need it to begin with. security updates usually don't cause many issues but library and kernel updates 100% have the ability to cause WW3.
I tried to move from Hyper-V to esxi and couldn't as i couldn't do core things that I use constantly
Expanding ZFS pools is one of those things you plan for. For instance, I have a 6-drive box I will be rebuilding soon, fully populated with big drives now, but when I say big I mean "big" - ish. My next setup will start with one pool of one mirror, out of two huge drives (12+12TB, or bigger). It can then be expanded by adding more vdevs to the pool. Probably will be in the form of another mirror of 12+12. It's not as flexible perhaps but it's damned solid and the data is checksummed. Unraid is fine for what it is, but I'm not giving up ZFS. ZFS is front and center in FreeNAS or XigmaNAS (I kind of like the latter, it's the direct continuation of the original FreeNAS before Ix got the name) and it's not a plugin based second class citizen.
For the average home user, ZFS is a huge overhead to learn and support. You do not need to run ZFS on unRaid (unless you are that way inclined).
To add extra storage on unRaid. Stop the server, plug in hard drive (any size, but less than the parity -you can have two parity drives), power on and format it.
That's all.
You and your videos are great and I appreciate the knowledge dump. I did notice an inaccuracy at 17:34. You called H.265/HEVC a "lossless transcode", but that is a lossy codec. I think you meant a "visually lossless transcode".