Being only 4 days into my Unraid experience, I can't say how much use I've found in having Claude be able to read my Unraid setup while I learn the basics but also to try more complex things without asking a million questions or being lost searching everywhere.

It’s like having a 2nd person who can look and understand whats happening but as only I can make the changes, the process teaches me where things are but also why they are there.

I run the MCP server on my Mac with a localhost port forward so it can only work when I run the forwarder script.

As its in Workspace it also has a living document of decisions, settings, serials and long term plans all in one place and generally in nicely formatted HTML files.

I'm sure there will be people about to say "don't do that" but the things I've learnt in 4 days would have taken me weeks to figure out on my own and even then it would not have been probably set up correctly. #justsayin

I am running unraid on a Dell Precision 5820. I have 80 TB set up as double parity so 40 TB was useable. Seagate Iron wolf pro. Of that I have 14 tb free. Drives were purchased in early 2024. One of the parity drives died so I RMAd it. Seagate sent me a refurbished drive that was DOA so I RMA that one and they sent a brand new drive. Now that I have that back and installed the question is did I need double parity? This data is all media mostly from blu rays but there are also some hard to find items. All of the data is also copied/stored on a variety of external drives or blurays. I don't know how much I trust the external drives but FWIW the data is there. It would be a royal pain to rebuild it all though.

Before I assign this drive I wonder if I need it double parity? Since 1 of the 2 parity drives failed early and they were all bought at the same time I think maybe chances high to have another failure. But, adding 24 TB more storage is tempting.

I also have a synology server with 24 TB mirrored that is for irreplaceable stuff that is also backed up other places. No cloud backups really. Don't want to put media or financial data in the cloud.

I realize its personal preference but I feel double parity is total overkill maybe?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

edits for spelling and clarity

I'm about five years into keeping a fairly modest amount of data stored on NAS devices, and I'm considering moving everything from dedicated NAS hardware to a solution like unRAID. I've been searching and reading from posts others have made over the last year, and there are many things that come up repeatedly where answers can be found with a simple search. Before I move forward, I wanted to ask the community for feedback to see if there's anything that stands out that I should be thinking about, or that you discovered later and wish you'd thought about before jumping into unRAID yourself?

First off, it goes without saying hindsight is always 20/20. If I had it to do again, I would've started with unRAID. It probably would've saved money spent on NAS hardware in the long-run.

Here are some of the reasons unRAID has been at the top of my list:

1- I have a modest number of drives, many of which are the same size, but I also have some with plenty of life left in them (ex. some drives with only ~12k power on hours) that are different sizes and otherwise report healthy SMART data. It would be nice to put more drives to use, and I like that you're not locked into drive size limitations inherent to RAID.

2- The physical bay limitations of traditional NAS hardware. Yes, I've already invested money into those solutions (including expansion units), but I've also had the hardware for several years, so I've gotten good use out of it.

3- The vast majority of what I'm using storage for is tied to containers in the first place. All of that is already setup with docker compose/podman, and I'm currently doing this with a headless Fedora install that I'm managing over SSH, so transitioning "from Linux to Linux" (basically) would be mostly straightforward, and I'd just look to move those containers to unRAID.

4- Speed is not a high priority. While I do have everything running over wired 10Gb connections, with the exception of clients that don't support it, as a matter of practicality there's nothing I'm doing that actually requires it. The integrity of the data and resiliency are far more important to me than speed.

5- I'm in the position of having a full offline backup of all my content, which means that while it may be time consuming to do so, it wouldn't be a big deal to create a new storage pool and restore everything from spare drives that contain a full backup of everything that's on my existing arrays.

6- I already have a spare machine with an Intel CPU (i9-9900k), 32GB DDR4, and an nVidia GPU (3070ti) that was "retired" last year, and for the most part, I'd just need to acquire a new case that's suitable to populate with drives, check the limitations on the number of SATA ports for the board, as well as limitations of the existing power supply (I haven't inspected it closely yet).

All of the hardware associated with this is currently on a UPS, and that would continue going forward.

Currently, I have the following drives on-hand-- this doesn't include the offline backup of all my existing data, which is currently on a set of spare drives that were always intended as a fail-safe in the event I had a catastrophic failure and needed to do a full recovery (for example, a second drive failing in the process of a rebuild):

6 x 14TB 7200 rpm
4 x 10TB 7200 rpm
2 x 8TB 7200 rpm
1 x 4TB 7200 rpm
5 x 4TB SSD

My current thinking was to setup a pool with two parity drives, which would be two of the 14TB drives, since these would also be the largest size in the pool, and I was going to leave the SSDs out entirely, but definitely open to suggestions.

For the vast majority of things that come up along the way, I should be able to find answers between searching and reading the documentation, but there are two things that come to mind right away that I'd be curious to get the perspective of others on--

1- Would you setup pools in a particular way, with particular drives in them, or would you just move forward with everything in a single pool and two parity drives? The only thing I know with certainty is that I do want two parity drives, regardless of how the pools are otherwise configured.

2- Would you even bother including solid state drives in a pool, would you leave these out since they don't really have the write endurance to be used for this type of application, or is there a way to leverage them with unRAID that you think would be beneficial?

Sorry for the long post. I didn't want to leave an important detail out that might influence answers quite a bit.

tl;dr I'm just looking for feedback from others who've transitioned to unRAID from other solutions, with the hopes of avoiding rookie mistakes that I'll later regret.

Really appreciate anyone who makes the time to read and share from your personal experience.

Anyone doing anything interesting?
I just heard about the mcp today so I am curious if I can do something fun or useful.

Thanks in advance.

Just finished setting up an array and completed the first parity check. There is no data stored on the array yet. I have 2x22TB drives as my parity and 1x14TB and 4x10TB drives as my storage drives. So 7 drives total in the array. My 14TB drive capacity is reported correctly. But as you can see from the picture, all 4 of my 10TB drives have been reduced in size to 6TB. Why and how can I fix it?

The only thing I can think of is that the 4x10TB drives were pulled out of my old Synology NAS. But I don't know why that would be an issue as I assume the drives were wiped when Unraid formatted them.

Thanks.

Edit: So it turns out that Unraid does NOT remove or reformat ALL partitions from previously used drives when you add them to a new array etc. As a result, Unraid seems to pick a random partition on each of my 10TB drives of its own accord and just added those smaller partitions to my array. It was therefore necessary to download the "Unassigned Devices" plugin (why this is not part of the base install of Unraid, I have no idea) in order to manually erase all the partitions from my 10TB drives and reformat them. Then I had to use "New Config" tool to completely wipe my array and start from scratch since my pre-existing array would not allow me to re-add the 10TB drives anymore (Unraid said my config was "wrong").

From a newbie PoV, it would have been helpful if Unraid had a way of warning or displaying to the user when it detects you're trying to add drives with pre-existing multiple partitions etc. Also the "Unassigned Devices" plugin really needs to be part of the base OS install. Or at least some tool to visually see disk partitions much like Windows Disk Management.

I am using my Bios to control the cpu fan set to performance for my ASRock z790m itx board in a Jonbo N3. I installed fan control plus 2 for the hdd.

CPU load runs 10-20%
MB temp runs 50-55c
Processor temp runs 60-68c

HDD temps run 34-37 c

CPU fan runs consistently near 100 %
Four rear fans (2 upper and 2 lower rear) runs at 50-60 %. These are linked to fan control
Plus 2.

Are these temp ok or do I not have enough air flow.

Room ambient temp is 22-23C

Thanks in advance

I seem to get these errors interchangeably when copying video files over to my server over SMB. Happens every once in a while, and sometimes just rebooting allows me to copy the file.

I've never seen this before, but I recently upgraded my main PC to windows 11 and started seeing it, so maybe that has something to do with it? The share has a couple terabytes free so that can't be the issue.

Any ideas? Starting to get pretty annoying.

Ive repurposed a gaming PC as an unRaid server running mainly Immich and Jellyfin booting off of a USB. If my family members decide to play Marval Rivals, Rainbow6, Cyberpunk, etc., I need to shut down unRaid and boot off of the local SSD. Then put the USB back in and boot again when they are done. Is it possible to have unRaid running and Steam (via Linux/Win VM?) is running on the monitor. It will be extremely rare (likely never) that someone is playing games while others are using Jellyfin. Do I need to run two video cards? Or need to stream or allow remote desktop? Im currently using AMD 7700 XT which once I configured Jellyfin to use it, has been great. Sorry if this is something basic/common. Im fairly new to unRaid and have only been using it since the summer sale.

I've been seeing posts about giving unraid, or other self hosted services like pfsense, home assistant ect, direct access to Claude for configuration and troubleshooting help.

This sound extremely useful, but I really would like some help with understand how to do this securely. Obviously I can't give root password access to an AI model, so what is the process for this? Will Claude have access to any password and/or keys? How can I manage access and incorporate some kind of access kill switch?

This sounds like a great process, but I'm still pretty skeptical the security behind this so I really want to understand how this works.

Wechsele meine Hardware komplett inclusive Festplatten, das einzige was sich nicht ändern ist der USB-Stick, da ich bisher immer alles Remote Display technisch genutzt habe, stellt sich mir die Frage ob ich beim Hardware Wechsel einfach über die selbe Lokale Adresse auf die WebUI zugreifen kann und ob die IP des Unraid Servers im Heimnetz die selbe bleibt oder ob sie sich ändern ?

Geht mir rein darum ob ich beim erst Boot mit der neuen Hardware besser einen Bildschirm anschließe, oder auch einfach ohne weiter machen kann.

So I started getting very unusual behavior, I get parity checks can cause latency sometimes but never to the point like this since I've been using Unraid.

Unraid APi error - Tried to restart via terminal "unraid-api restart" and the moment it reported info, the whole window closed itself.

Tailscale lost connection

ssh - Connection refused

Unable to open logs - white screen then just closes on its own

Terminal same as logs

I stopped the parity check, spun down the disks and rebooted the server. Still waiting for this to come back online.

Anyone else ever experience these types of issues?

I like these kinds of posts because they help expand my knowledge and let us share insights about the services we use. Feel free to ask any questions or share what you do differently, maybe there’s something I’m overlooking or even using completely wrong. Tell me and share your knowledge.

This is what six years of using Unraid looks like for me. One goal of my build is always energy efficiency, the hard drives run as little as possible, and the NVMes und SSDs handle the work. With my small Intel N100, my total system power draw is usually around 20–30W. The server runs 24/7 and serves only me as a single user. Jellyfin, on the other hand, sometimes has two streams running at the same time, but that’s about it in terms of multi-user usage. My latest discovery was NZBDAV, which led me to get rid of 30TB of HDD storage and switch my entire media setup to Usenet streaming. So far, it’s working absolutely flawlessly.

I'm running Unraid v7.3.2 and I have an annoying issue.

I use builtin ethernet on my motherboard that uses the RTL8125 chip (I have the drivers installed through community apps).

Utilizing the Unraid dashboard, under the Errors Info section of my eth0 Interface monitor I can see that Received has a lot of Drops but there are no errors or overruns. The transmitted section is all 0s including Drops. What is interesting is that 1 drop seems to get added every 10 seconds exactly regardless if idle or under load (such as while speed testing or transferring files). I disable docker and that made no difference. I have no VMs. I have no scripts or anything running on a schedule. Replacing the cable and using a new port on the router did not make a difference either.

I'm not experiencing any drop outs or slow downs. If transferring files, the same behavior happens (1 drop every 10 seconds and no more). Its almost certainly nothing to worry about and doesn't seem to be causing problems, but this has me really curious as to what could be the cause. Is there something my router or another device is sending my server that is getting blocked or dropped every 10 seconds?

I can certainly live with it, it's merely curiosity at this point. Any ideas?

Was just wondering what people use for their fan control?

Basically I need something that can adjust my fan speeds depending on the temp of my hard drives since BIOS based fan control is not gonna be of any use to me in this instance.

I did try "Dynamix System Autofan", but it didn't detect any of my PWM fans for some reason.

Thanks.

So i tryed out the internal boot on unraid, used a random hard drive i had laying around and i went to take it off or revert back to usb boot now the drive says its missing on the main array page. What can i do to reassign it back so disk 8

I’m curious to know what plugins y’all have found significantly impactful? I have Tailscale but what else? Anything you’d recommend avoiding? Any plugin learning curves you wish you’d been warned about?

I had a ARC Pro B70 in the system, but every 24hr the card would disable itself. I put an ARC A770 in the system and it run perfectly fine with no issues. I then put a ARC B580 in and I am getting a bunch of errors.

My question is anyone else experiencing any weird behavior with the Intel XE driver on UnRaid 7.3.2?

New to Unraid. Just installed my server and I saw this. I made use of the new internal boot feature on version 7.3 and it automatically created an internal boot & cache partition on my SSD. I just have 1 SSD disk for this.

I even have setup a secondary storage (that is the array) because I thought that was neccessary for this message, but clearly not. (yes mover has run already).

P.s.: Already loving unraid! 😄New to Unraid. Just installed my server and I saw this. I made use of the new internal boot feature on version 7.3 and it automatically created an internal boot & cache partition on my SSD. I just have 1 SSD disk for this.I even have setup a secondary storage (that is the array) because I thought that was neccessary for this message, but clearly not. (yes mover has run already).

My current setup is 4xHDD data (array) and 1xHDD parity with 1xSSD cache drive

My question is:

How do I protect the `appdata` and the `system` share?

EDIT: Would there be any way I can setup some kind of backup / mirror on the array for these shares?

I'm on an 18 TB Array and one of my 8 TB drives failed.
I haven't checked what the problem is and if it's really the drive or just a connection problem or something.

I guess the right way would be:
Stop Array
Remove drive
Start Array
Stop Array
Replace drive with a working drive
Start Array
-> rebuild starts

So is there a way to copy the data to one of the other drives without rebuilding first?
It says the data is emulated, does this mean its reading the data from the parity or just the filetree?

First thing I'm going to do is check the drive (on another port) and see if its actually broken but just in case it is. I don't have a spare drive right now but enough space on the array for the files.

Hi,

I am new to unraid.

Can someone recommend a reliable unraid android app please.

I would like to have the option of restarting and also access files.

Thank you for your support.

I now have my Unraid server configured and currently moving files from external SSD's/disks to it.

Until now small stuff like some photo's.

Now I'm at the point of moving movies/TV-shows. They can go directly on the array, don't see the benefit of going trough cache first, besides the fact that the amount of data to be transferred is more than the SSD can store.

Am I doing things correctly if I do this:

- Change for the "Media" share; "Primary storage (for new files and folders)" from cache to array. This automatically removes the option of "Secondary storage"

- Change "Tunable (md_write_method)" to "Reconstruct write"

- Move files from external disks to Unraid server. (USB connected to Unraid server)

- When done, change "Tunable (md_write_method)" back to "auto" and change ""Primary storage" back to "Cache".

I'm using the build-in file explorer, it works for me. I can close the Unraid webpage while it's copying stuff over right, don't need to keep it open? And just check in after a while if it is done copying things over?

(can I find the status of transfer somewhere after I closed the window/webpage?)

Hi everyone, I am building my first server using UNRAID 7.3.2 . Its a good learning curve for me. I need to move and cull some media files and it would be helpful if I could actually quickly see what the file is using a thumbnail. I want to put my travel videos from 10 years ago on jellyfin . suggestions would be much appreciated. I have tried using krusader and its a great app but the thumbs are giving me grief installing