Unraid vs OMV For My Use Case?

[infernuz]

Hi everyone! I started to study out of hobby about home networking and currently trying to setup my first NAS. I have Unraid trial ongoing right now and learning stuff, mostly via internet and YT guides. My computer skill level is mostly gamer knowledge, so coding stuff for these needs me to follow guides along. I narrowed my NAS OS into 2: Unraid and OMV and based on my use case, I want to know which will be better suit for me.

Current Data Situation
- all of my photos are backed up in OneDrive and external drive, so I want something locally stored for full control, with those in cloud as backups (to follow the 3-2-1 rule)
- my smartphone photos are synced to Google Photos; my wife's in iCloud

Use Case:
- long term storage of my photos, documents and other stuff (nothing critical, photos will serve as memories so I want them to be kept)
- currently do not stream any media stuff since we both use Netflix; might change when we have kid and I need to store children videos locally
- backup my smartphone photos to the NAS including when from outside the network
- storage for my games that I do not play (but will be moved to my gaming PC if suddenly I have the urge to play it again instead of re-downloading)

Current Setup
- I got my hands on a $20 HP Thin Client T630 to learn stuff. Unraid is currently installed in it, I was able to access the share locally from my main PC, able to connect from external using Cloudflare Tunnel. Currently having trouble syncing from smartphone to my containers from external (and even internal) which maybe I haven't figured yet the way.
- I plan to get my hands to a HP EliteDesk 805 G1 SFF for a good deal of $35. I plan to install 1x2TB for parity and 2x1TB for data storage initially. I read Unraid makes it easy to add/modify drives in the pool, which make me inclined to it.

Question:
Based on above, it seems my requirement is mostly data storage only, and not spawning any dockers or VMs for now. In terms of beginner friendliness, do you think Unraid will suit me or I am better with OMV? The reason for the question is of course, the $59 one time fee of Unraid OS. I am willing to purchase such if it will really save me lots of trouble in the long run, but I want another opinion from someone more knowledgeable.

If I plan eventually to use for example Home Assistant and other services, maybe I could do to another machine instead.

EDIT: TrueNas while I know will give me much flexibility and ZFS stuff, is currently overwhelming for me sorry.

Appreciate your feedback!

 

[slidermike]

IMO, having used both I like unRaid better.

That said unRaid has a price to unlock while OMV is free to use.

For unRaid aside from the obvious google searches, watch spaceinvader one videos. He makes some good "how to's".

https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceinvaderOne

SpaceInvaderOne - Unraid

forums.unraid.net

Good luck & enjoy the journey!

 

[ttxman]

You can also to look into OMV (or any linux or even windows) + SnapRAID, I'm running it for years. SnapRAID have quite similar features to unRaid but it is not online, you need to run the parity computation periodically (aka daily or when you add bunch of new data) to create shapshots. Newly added data are not protected until you create next snapshot. (And to detect and fix checksum errors and bit rot you need to run it periodically too - like each 3 days check oldest 10% of my drives). Quite good for hoarding photos, videos and backups, when you usually just add more data to the disks and don't modify files often.

They have nice comparison on their webpage.

Some advantages over traditional raid (some features are similar to unRaid):
Only disks you are currently using are running. (No need to spin up everything when playing a video - noise reduction)
It is filesystem agnostic (XFS, EXT4, or whatever you want on each drive)
You can use/add/remove existing drives any time without reformating.
And you can just take 1 drive with data from your machine and plop it in another, copy data on, plop it back and everything still works.
When you loose enough drives to break traditional raid and if there are any data drives left, they are normally readable.
There is split parity feature - you can use multiple physical drives instead of single parity drive. "RAID5" like 2x16TB data drives + parity "drive" made of 8TB+6TB+4TB is possible). After you upgrade to bigger drives, you can use the old ones to add additional parity)

 

[louie1961]

I have no unraid experience so my feedback may not be completely useful. That being said, I run two OMV instances: One hosted on a raspberry pi and one virtualized on one of my proxmox servers. OMV is pretty simple to use and has a halfway decent community if you need help.

On the Raspberry pi I am using USB to SATA adapters which eliminates the possibility of using software raid. But it runs great and I use it for Proxmox backups and to run rsync as a backup destination for my Synology NAS.

On the proxmox server, I am using it to host the data for my Nextcloud instance. I run three 2 TB disks in a mdadm (linux software raid) raid 5 array. I have the array formatted with BTRFS. This is very similar to how Synology uses BTRFS and it avoids the issues with the BTRFS raid functionality not being ready for primetime. With this set up I get a copy in write file system including snapshots and disk scrubs. It can all be done from the OMV gui with no need to do anything from the command line if you don't want to. I feel like it gives me almost everything I would want from ZFS without consuming tons of memory and making it easier to add disks if I want later.

OMV is not without some glitches though. Occasionally, updates do break the system, but the developer usually resolves these issues fairly quickly.(and there is only one developer really, which some people may find to be a negative to OMV). I also wish there was a version of OMV based on the latest Debian. Its in the works but not ready yet as I understand it. By comparison, Proxmox 8.0 based onDebian Bookworm was released in July

Since OMV is free you should definitely try it

 

[infernuz]

Thanks for the response everyone. If I wanted only purely SMB share drive without any services, does OMV will be more than enough w/o spending on a license on UnRaid? Then if I want to try other services like running containers or VM, then UnRaid will be the easier option?

 

[louie1961]

I mean if all you want is SMB, you can use any Linux version or even windows. OMV will be great for just serving up NFS or SMB shares. It also runs docker containers, but I have never used it for that. I run my docker containers in a Debian 12 virtual machine using docker, docker compose and Portainer