{"id":3292,"date":"2017-05-21T16:36:51","date_gmt":"2017-05-21T23:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/?p=3292"},"modified":"2017-05-24T10:11:59","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T17:11:59","slug":"from-windows-to-unraid-choosing-my-next-home-server-os","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/from-windows-to-unraid-choosing-my-next-home-server-os\/","title":{"rendered":"From Windows to unRAID: choosing my next home-server OS"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first in several posts about getting unRAID setup for the first time. Look for the unRAID tag to see all of the related posts<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I’ve run a Windows 10 (and Vista, 7, 8, 8.1) machine as our household’s file server for many, many years. It worked well enough. I had two hard drives set up as a RAID, and an SSD to run the OS from. But I began to realize that this setup was a lil risky and pretty inflexible – most notably it would never notify me if one of my disks started to fail (or any other data-oriented problems, for that matter). And it wasn’t easy to run the open source software packages I was wanting to run (like OpenVPN <\/a>or ZoneMinder<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This was a prescient\u00a0worry given that my two 1.5TB drives which stored all of my family’s most important photos & files were about to fail.<\/p>\n

I looked around at getting a dedicated box for just file serving (Synology, QNAP<\/a>). I looked at software to add to the Windows install to solve some of my issues like better data protection (most notably SnapRAID<\/a>). And I looked at the slew of dedicated home NAS software like FreeNAS<\/a>, Nas4Free<\/a>, and unRAID<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ultimately I picked unRAID because it looked to be the easiest to get everything running, had a good and active support community, was cheap (but not free) and was based on a Linux distribution (instead of FreeBSD). The biggest thing going against<\/em> unRAID to me was that (1) it didn’t have native bit rot (data degradation) protection like SnapRAID or FreeNAS and (2) it’s not open source.\u00a0I decided I can live with a commercial project and that I can find a work around to protect against bit rot.<\/p>\n

I was really close to choosing FreeNAS, but they were going through some turmoil with a failed release of their next-generation version 10 that had the Docker support I wanted… so I passed for now.<\/p>\n

It should be clear that this isn’t intended to be a comparison of all the NAS options out there – if you’re interested in doing your own comparison, there’s a bunch of info out there and you should judge for yourself. For example,\u00a0SnapRAID has a really nice comparison table of the file system capabilities<\/a> that I found very useful.<\/p>\n

What my computer did before (running Windows):<\/strong><\/p>\n