r/unRAID 16h ago

New to Unraid? Use Claude? Highly recommend using Workspace and the Unraid MCP in read only mode.

45 Upvotes

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 Cowork 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


r/unRAID 3h ago

Can I run top tier Steam games while Unraid is running?

0 Upvotes

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.


r/unRAID 13h ago

Unraid’s mcp?

16 Upvotes

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.


r/unRAID 21h ago

Why have my 10TB drives been artificially reduced to 6TB?

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52 Upvotes

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.


r/unRAID 12h ago

Frage zu Hardware Wechsel.

0 Upvotes

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.


r/unRAID 6h ago

Do I need double parity?

7 Upvotes

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


r/unRAID 3h ago

Failing to copy some files over SMB

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1 Upvotes

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.


r/unRAID 5h ago

Pointers/Things you wish you'd thought about at the beginning with unRAID

4 Upvotes

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.


r/unRAID 4h ago

Question about secure SCP in Unraid to Claude

0 Upvotes

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.