I dont have the time to go through unRAID again. I even worked on a unRAID box once. cause a mate build one. its shit. if you ever worked with an actual fileserver, hypervisor or container management you will despise unRAID. its garbage. plain and simple.
if its enough for you cause it got you everything you wanted and knew about, fine. but dont try to give it a reason to exist in the world of professionals. of ppl who actually understand what its doing and can tell you why no other solution offers it.
I'll make my point clear again: its garbage.
its just one giant pile of half assed solutions marketed towards newbies who just get all their dreams based on knowledge gaps fullfilled. like disk arrays where you can use any drive you want and expand anytime you want. also where SSD cache can just be added later on. and on top of all that (which is far from my usual rants on unRAID) its even promoted by LTT.
and it costs money. garbage that costs money. and I thought only microsoft ever gets away with that.

unraid is made to serve files and run containers and VMs etc but everything on it is implemented in the worst possible way and the entire thing is looked down upon in here.
Consider unRAID? I never consider unRAID. I consider it pure cancer. dont waste money and risk your data with unRAID.

Unraid is like a hypervisor made by a teenager in high school based off the code base of RouterOS (/s).
if you understand the concepts of arrays then you should understand how bad and risky unRAIDs concept is, which is also not a new concept. its been around for decades as RAID3 and 4.
the storage architecture is everything ppl evaluated as "dont want that risk for my data" in the past decade.
its a bad approach, ghetto stack of different solutions and, what annoys me the most, still markets as a safe, fast and cheap storage solution that is everything the rest of the market is not. and ppl that dont understand storage will like and buy that. but ask yourself why the rest of the market is not that...
unraid is RAID3 with logical devices and a dedicated "cache" that gets moved to disk on schedule on top.... that is the definition of *bad*
the entire storage concept is worlds from the do's and don'ts that have developed in the enterprise over decades. there are reasons you cant just use any drive you still have lying around in an array and expand it one by one. or just add some random SSD as cache....

I have a mate that runs unRAID. mainly cause he watches LTT. its cancer. even he acknowledges by now that anything else would have probably been better but he doesnt want to migrate his 50TB of stuff off it now. he rather buys news drives every now and then and restarts the box cause docker and VM services keep hanging.
tbh in most usecases you dont gain anything but risk so you might as well stick to cloning external harddrives.... cause you dont gain any performance. at all.
even I have to say that storagespaces is dimensions better than unraid.

[...] in order to achieve this expansion approach you need to either virtuallly equalize all disks like SHR does or you put parity on a single disk and just say "fuck it" to an actual failure case - that is the concept of unRAID
also unRAIDs performance is shit as you only ever achieve single disk IOPS
as its all bound to the parity disk. by now you can run 2 parity disks but in return run additional CPU overhead. to boost speeds you can use SSDs as cache but that is literally just cache - it caches your writes and flushes them to disk at a given time. that is not how an actual array works. its super ghetto. like a highschooler came up with the idea. with 0 knowledge of enterprise grade storage architecture. what I am saying is that unRAID is slow and far from safe. its just convenient when being on budget - but that is not the way to go with mass storage.
its because reduncancy and performance go to shit in unRAID. a single parity disk is like the unsafest call you can make + parity calc is limited by that single disks IOPS. in addition to that your whole array never exceeds singe disk IOPS in general cause they are running parity. different sized disks also give you a lot of block inconsistency with parity and fragmentation. even cache disks do not render this irrelevant. unRAID. is. shit. in addition to that VM management and the webinterface in general are garbage, networking is AIDS and throughput on shares is a joke. I have a friend that went with unRAID for his all in one homeserver.
he has issues ever since and keeps building the worst workaround solutions I have ever seen.
And even though can do dual parity now that doesnt lighten the load on the disk so the point still stands.
also SSD cache is not covered by parity.
even a VM host and running a windows file server in there is better than unRAID.

I am totally ignoring the bad OS design of unRAID btw.. this is purely based on the storage architecture.
and comparing it to snapraid is rather unfair. snapraid is a DIY solution and not OOB selling itself as a well developed solution that protects your data and is fast
both of which are lies.

I have a kernel level hatred towards unRAID.
as long as you dont run unRAID I wont harm you.