Unraid on Pieter Viljoen's Blog

Moving from Unraid to Proxmox VE

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 20:18:48 +0000

I finally took the plunge and moved from Unraid to Proxmox VE.

I used to love Unraid, but at some point the easy to use web management UI and app store ecosystem simply lacked capabilities I needed for deployment automation and configuration tasks. Then there is the problem with the poor IO performance, that I’ve written several posts on, and excessive SSD writes wearing out drives, that have remained unresolved, and no solution seems to be forthcoming.

Unraid User-Share vs. Disk-Share SMB Performance

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 16:44:42 +0000

This is yet another post on Unraid’s poor SMB performance, but I think I narrowed down the cause of the problem to the Unraid FUSE filesystem. I discovered this about 2 months ago, but with COVID-19 and no kids weekend sporting event duties, I have some time to post.

In this round of testing I compared the performance of “User” shares vs. “Disk” shares. An Unraid “User” share is a volume backed by Unraid’s FUSE filesystem, while a “Disk” share is a volume directly backed by the disk’s native filesystem.

Unraid vs. Ubuntu Bare Metal SMB Performance

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 04:14:07 +0000

In my last test I compared Unraid SMB performance with an Ubuntu VM running on Unraid, and Ubuntu outperformed Unraid. I was wondering if the VM disk image synthetically improved performance, maybe IO caching, so this time I tested Ubuntu on the same hardware that runs Unraid.

I configured the system to boot from either the Unraid USB stick, or an Ubuntu Server USB stick. In both cases the hardware was exactly the same, and the SMB share was on the same 4 x 1TB Samsung 860 Pro SSD BTRFS volume. I mounted the BTRFS volume using the same mount options that Unraid uses. The Ubuntu Samba server used default options, the only change I made was to register the share.

Unraid vs. Ubuntu SMB Performance

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 18:40:05 +0000

In my last round of testing I found that Unraid v6.8 SMB still underperforms compared to Windows Server 2019, but I was wondering if it is a Linux Samba problem, or an Unraid problem.

I installed an Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 LTS VM on Unraid, bridged network, 16GB RAM, 128GB raw disk located on the BTRFS cache volume, consisting of 4 x Samsung Pro 860 SSD drives. This is exactly the same configuration I use for the W2K19 test VM. I installed Samba on Ubuntu using default options.

Unraid SMB Performance: v6.7.2 vs. v6.8.1

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 19:07:49 +0000

I previously wrote about the poor SMB performance I experienced in Unraid v6.7.2. Unraid v6.8 supposedly addressed SMB performance issues for concurrent read and write operations, and after waiting for the first bugfix release of v6.8, I re-tested using v6.8.1.

In my last test I used a combination of batch files and copy and paste, this time I wrote a tool to make repeat testing easy. I am not going to describe the usage here, see the instructions at the GitHub repository. There are new reports in v6.8 of poor SMB performance when a folder contains large numbers of files, so I added a test to try and simulate that behavior, by creating a large number of files, then reading each file, then deleting each file.

Unraid repeat parity errors on reboot

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 01:52:30 +0000

This post started with a quick experiment, but after hardware incompatibilities forced me to swap SSD drives, and subsequently lose a data volume, it turned into a much bigger effort.

My two Unraid servers have been running nonstop without any issues for many months, last I looked the uptime on v6.7.2 was around 240 days. We recently experienced an extended power failure, and I noticed 5 parity errors, on both servers, after the servers were restarted.

Unraid in production, a bit rough around the edges, and terrible SMB performance

Tue, 11 Jun 2019 02:51:12 +0000

In my last two posts I described how I migrated from W2K16 and hardware RAID6 to Unraid. Now that I’ve had two Unraid servers in production for a while, I’ll describe some of the good and not so good I experienced.

Running Docker on Unraid is magnitudes easier compared to getting Docker to work on Windows. Docker allowed me to move all but one of my workloads from VM’s to containers, simplifying updates, reducing the memory footprint, and improving performance.

Unraid and Robocopy Problems

Mon, 13 May 2019 03:12:41 +0000

In my last post I described how I converted one of my W2K16 servers to Unraid, and how I am preparing for conversion of the second server.

As I’ve been copying all my data from W2K16 to Unraid, I discovered some interesting discrepancies between W2K16 SMB and Unraid SMB. I use robocopy to mirror files from one server to the other, and once the first run completes, any subsequent runs should complete without needing to copy any files again (unless they were modified).

Moving from W2K16 to Unraid

Mon, 06 May 2019 01:34:42 +0000

I have been happy with my server rack running my UniFi network equipment and two Windows Server 2016 (W2K16) instances. I use the servers for archiving my media collection and running Hyper-V for all sorts of home projects and work related experiments. But, time moves on, one can never have enough storage, and technology changes. So I set about a path that led to me replacing my W2K16 servers with Unraid.

I currently use Adaptec 7805Q and 81605ZQ RAID cards, with a mixture of SSD for caching, SSD RAID1 for boot and VM images, and HDD RAID6 for the large media storage array. The setup has been solid, and although I’ve had both SSD and HDD failures, the hot spares kicked in, and I replaced the failed drives with new hot spares, no data lost.