A few years ago I was looking for a new backup solution as I had outgrown the dual drive network storage I was using and since said drive network storage had also just failed. That is when I found some videos on Unraid and made the jump. … This post has taken me way too long to write. I think I started off planning to write a long thesis on Unraid, but Unraid is actually pretty straightforward and does exactly what it says on the package – build a storage server out of more or less anything.
I have been using Unraid for some time now, I started off with a Dell PowerEdge T20 and filled it up with as many drives as I could. That worked very well for some time (a good year or 2) until I found I had more drives than the little server chassis would hold, so I upgraded to a consumer Asrock board and a low end consumer AMD processor. The upgrade was as simple as moving the data and USB drives from the Dell chassis to the case with the Asrock board and then reconnecting and powering up the whole lot again. All the drives and storage were recognized and nothing was lost especially since I had mismatched hard drive sizes – a cool feature for Unraid, not all the drives of the storage array have to be the same size.
One would think consumer hardware would not be good for a 24/7 storage server but it turned out to be super stable, until I ignored a failed drive … and had a second drive fail. If the storage had been configured as a RAID 5, or something along those lines the array would have been lost along with the data, however this did not happen. The loss of 2 drives definitely put the whole data set down until they were replaced, but not all the data was lost – only what was stored on those 2 failed drives, the data on the rest of the array was safe and came back when fresh drives were put in.
Since that time I added extra parity drives to handle multiple drive failures, swapped out the consumer motherboard for server board and Xeon CPUs, and even expanded the array with larger drives with no major failures to report. The server runs as my backup and network data storage, Plex server, NFS ISO storage for virtualization servers among other roles as needed without any noticeable headaches. There is some cost associated with Unraid, but I highly recommend it (not a paid shill) for the ease and flexibility of the software – one can start off with a less expensive license to get started and upgrade as more drives are needed – really handy and really useful.