Unraid vs. TrueNAS

If you buy something from a link, Acorn Talk may earn a commission. See my Affiliate Programs statement.

I bought a license for Unraid over the weekend. I’ve had an iXSystems/TrueNAS Mini XL+ since Nov 2020 (and running TrueNAS Scale since it was available). Around Sept. 2023, I’d shut the server down as I was weary of the user experience, ZFS, and the bugs I’d encounter in my very basic usage of the system. I originally got caught up in the hype I suppose when FreeNAS became TrueNAS, and the hardware looked great (and my aging Synology was no longer supported).

But, my mental model of ZFS and the terminology they’ve chosen never clicked with me: it just didn’t make sense to me. I’d read explanations and I’d even read a history about ZFS to understand better the journey the file system took to arrive on my server. None of that helped. Nor did it help avoid bugs in either the TrueNAS UI or the underlying ZFS components as implemented. So, I shut it down.

Last week, I booted it back up and tried to erase/wipe some drives so I could use them elsewhere and even that encountered issues (I did find several of the issues documented as unresolved). I heard about Unraid from a friend and gave it a shot on the same hardware, as that hardware was not inexpensive. 😳

I won’t say I fell in love with the Unraid UI (as I definitely have not), but it is measurably better for me and my requirements.

One thing I did note after installing Unraid was that the 40TB (yes) of drives were running very hot in the server case. Well into the warning zone (they were apparently always running HOT, but the TrueNAS software didn’t expose the warnings in such a clear way that I’d noticed). So, I did a few things to resolve the temperature issue:

1. I opened the case and installed a new Nocturna fan. The standard fan isn’t great and this was a $28USD upgrade. It pulls more air than the stock fan and is quieter at the same speed. It requires a little bit of cable gymnastics, but it’s about a 5 minute process to replace.
2. Increased the fan speed. The system fans only spin up based on the CPU temperature and are quite willing to allow the HDDs to incinerate themselves in the case. The normal BIOS/UEFI UI doesn’t allow fan control (gah!), so I needed to use the web management interface. I’ve got it set to HeavyIO (which seems to be like 3/4 full fan speed). It’s by no means a quiet system anymore, but it never was silent. I doubt that anyone would want this in the same room with them unless they wanted a fan-noise generator.

Now the drives are all running under 36C vs 50-55C.

Unraid is unusual in that it doesn’t run of a system drive. It boots from a USB thumb stick (and then ties its license to that stick). I did a little research about to discover well recommended (and durable) flash drives and bought the Samsung FIT 128GB. The capacity is much larger than it needs to be, but, it was only $15USD. But the FIT is a small form factor so it doesn’t protrude from the back of the case in a risky way.

Unfortunately, the SSD I’d had in the system also died last week (it was 10 years old, so … ), and I replaced it with a new Crucial BX500 480GB to use as a cache drive. It was $38USD when I bought it last week. The MiniXL+ has a dedicated slot for the drive and Unraid supports a cache pool.

If you’re more than passively interested in Unraid, they’re changing their pricing model this week (the 27th of March), so you’ll want to check out the details right away.

There’s a free trial and it works on basically any Intel-based system (although systems with Hardware RAID are not recommended).