5 reasons why I use Unraid over TrueNAS Scale
Whether you are building yourself a home server from new components or repurposing old hardware, a NAS is a great project to enhance your home network capabilities. There is a good deal of choice when it comes to NAS operating systems and what you choose to go with will surely be something you’ll need to live with for a very long time.
Before committing to a NAS long term, you should first carefully evaluate your options, grab yourself a copy of the TrueNAS Scale and a trial of Unraid. As a long-time Unraid user, I often get asked why I prefer Unraid for my needs to the more conventional RAID based operating system TrueNAS Scale, so let’s dive in.
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5 Flexible storage expansion over time
Unraid provides an unfussy approach to storage expansion
When I decided to build a NAS many years ago, I wanted a system which would give me maximum flexibility with drive configurations. One of Unraid’s major advantages is that you can mix and match different drive sizes into an array. Unraid allows me to expand or even shrink my storage capabilities with any size drive as and when I want to. I don’t have to worry about matching the drive sizes or deciding from the start how big my array will be.
This unfussy approach to adding storage to my server has allowed me to build out my NAS over time. As an example of this, when I began with my system, it consisted of fewer, much smaller drives. Over time, larger hard disks became available and more affordable, allowing me to adopt larger drives into my array while keeping my older, smaller drives until they needed to be replaced with larger variants.
TrueNAS Scale does not currently allow for such easy organic growth by simply adding another drive here and there and incorporating it into the array.
The biggest selling point for me remains that Unraid continues to allow me to upgrade the capabilities of my server storage systems without significant technical headaches. The flexibility in this storage configuration has allowed my system to grow significantly in capabilities over time while not having to incur significant upfront costs or requiring me to rebuild my array to allow for a larger array.
4 Unraid drive fault tolerance works well
Unraid allows for just enough resilience without needing RAID
There is a lot to be said for running a home server using RAID. The inherent distribution that comes from striping data across the entire array can allow for stunning performance and resilience if it’s done right. TrueNAS offers exceptional RAID capabilities, and if you plan ahead and execute it properly from the start with enough drives, no doubt you’ll have a brilliant experience.
When it came to my own requirements for building a storage array, I naturally wanted some form of data resilience. RAID is fantastic as long as you’ve scaled your array from the start to allow for a high degree of failure with multiple drives. This requires a good number of disks and there can still be a chance that too many drives will fail to provide the parity to recover any data at all.
My needs for data resiliency are a bit of a mixed bag. I have a lot of data stored on my array but the majority of it is data I can get again. For example, I have a ton of music purchases downloaded to my home server which can simply be re-downloaded again from the sites where I bought them. It is very time-consuming to re-download things in the event of an outright failure, but not the end of the world. I also have a physical offsite backup of this data, so hopefully, it will never need to happen.
Unraid does, of course, give you resilience in drive failures through the use of a dedicated parity drive or multiple parity drives and it works well. I have recovered from multiple drive failures on a number of occasions without any issues at all.
Rather than striping the data across all drives, Unraid writes your files to the drives in a fairly sequential fashion, filling up each of the drives in a distributed way. Why this is appealing to me is that if there are catastrophic failures of drives and parity, the data remaining on the other drives will be easy to recover by simply plugging each drive into any Linux machine and copying off the data. For a RAID array, I’d need to be able to rebuild it with enough parity or lose it all. With Unraid, you’d at least be able to recover data from every drive which hadn’t failed, and that is just handy and convenient.
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3 Unraid disk performance is easy to manage
Using solid state drive caches will turbo boost your NAS experience
Unraid disk performance is slower than TrueNAS. This one comes up quite a bit when people are talking about Unraid vs. TrueNAS. Unraid as discussed does not stripe data across all the drives, this means you’re only getting the speed of a single drive when reading and writing data. A RAID array will use every disk in your array in combination to provide great read and write performance.
While this may seem like a clear dealbreaker, the reality is that I simply don’t need disk performance like this for the fairly static data I use on my main array at home. Sure, it would be nice to have, but as Unraid allows separate cache pools of fast storage, it’s easy to put the right workload on the correct storage. And by correct I mean an SSD or NVMe drive.
Fast virtual machine performance, no problem
Source: Western Digital
Almost all Unraid installations are likely to include some form of SSD or NVMe drive for the specific purposes of providing a fast cache for apps and VM’s. In my case, I have shifted all applications, fast access shares, and virtual machines onto high-performance SSD cache pools. The data from these pools is then periodically backed up to the spinning disks. This gives me both high speed access and automatic duplication onto the main spinning disk array.
As a home user, I am happy to forgo array level performance across the board to get a system which is easier to expand and manage over time. Where I do need superfast disk performance, I utilize the SSD cache drives in my Unraid server.
2 Unraid apps
With a NAS, it’s not all about disk resilience and performance, it’s also about the apps and services you’ll be running on top of it all. Unraid has a very healthy community of developers creating docker apps for the platform.
If there is an app or service you require, you’ll have almost no problem finding even the most obscure app to use in Unraid. While TrueNAS Scale will do just fine with the more popular apps, you may have issues finding absolutely everything you can think of.
As well as traditional apps, Unraid also allows community developers to create enhancements for the operating system in the form of plugins. I have covered many of these in my earlier Unraid article, but these are designed to actually bring new functionality to the user experience. The community app store currently has over two thousand apps to use alongside around two hundred plugins.
The community around Unraid is great for support and tutorials
Right from the earliest days of Unraid, there has been a strong focus on creating an active community through their dedicated forums. The result of this is that you can tap into many years of articles and posts covering all the questions and concerns you might have. As the operating system and apps have changed fairly little over the years, even the oldest resources can be adapted for learning purposes.
There can be only one?
Well, actually there can be many and the choice is great. We’re lucky to be comparing two outstanding NAS operating systems. The storage flexibility, ease of use, and the vast range of apps available for Unraid mean it’s a great fit for anyone looking to build a NAS. Unraid isn’t free, of course, but for the price of the license, you’re getting platform updates alongside the potential to save money on your upfront storage hardware costs. TrueNAS Scale will hopefully soon allow for a more flexible approach to adding storage in the future. Until then, Unraid continues to be my personal choice and recommendation for a majority of home users who intend to set up a long-term storage and app server.
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