UnRAID 6
Posted: Thu Apr 04, 2019 5:31 pm
I retired my HP Proliant N40L MicroServer running UnRAID 4.7 last year when I bought a Synology NAS, but it still worked fine and had 4 perfectly good 2TB drives in it with relatively low hours.
Well I decided to dust off the old UnRAID NAS today, figuring it was probably worth upgrading to the latest version of unRAID and putting it back in use as a local backup storage device for my server.
I did a little research and found out that my old unRAID version 4 Plus license was still good for the latest version 6 release. I looked through their FAQ and they have a whole section on how to upgrade an older version like mine without losing your configuration, and how to migrate your license. After confirming that version 6 would run just fine on my ancient HP Proliant N40L with 2GB of RAM, I went ahead and upgraded.
After a couple of hours of research it took about an hour to install and it's all good. The version 6 GUI is a LOT more full featured than the old version 4. It looks a lot like Synology's GUI now. Version 6 also supports Docker container apps, and VMs. This little server isn't powerful enough to run VMs (it's an AMD Turion dual core 1.5GHz), but the docker apps add a lot of features similar to Synology's Packages.
unRAID 6 adds the ability to install an SSD and use it as a cache drive to speed up writes (the slow write speeds was my only complaint about my unRAID box. Read speeds were always good). I'm going to toss a spare 240GB SSD I have laying around in there (I can connect it to the unused CD-Rom SATA port so as not to lose one of the four main SATA bays).
Overall, a fun experiment to play around with on a slow day, and it all went pretty well.
I put the little guy in my network closet on the opposite side of the house from the server for isolation in case of theft, fire, etc. I must say I've gotten a good little run out of that MicroServer. I bought it used from b-man1 WAY back in 2012. Can't complain.
Well I decided to dust off the old UnRAID NAS today, figuring it was probably worth upgrading to the latest version of unRAID and putting it back in use as a local backup storage device for my server.
I did a little research and found out that my old unRAID version 4 Plus license was still good for the latest version 6 release. I looked through their FAQ and they have a whole section on how to upgrade an older version like mine without losing your configuration, and how to migrate your license. After confirming that version 6 would run just fine on my ancient HP Proliant N40L with 2GB of RAM, I went ahead and upgraded.
After a couple of hours of research it took about an hour to install and it's all good. The version 6 GUI is a LOT more full featured than the old version 4. It looks a lot like Synology's GUI now. Version 6 also supports Docker container apps, and VMs. This little server isn't powerful enough to run VMs (it's an AMD Turion dual core 1.5GHz), but the docker apps add a lot of features similar to Synology's Packages.
unRAID 6 adds the ability to install an SSD and use it as a cache drive to speed up writes (the slow write speeds was my only complaint about my unRAID box. Read speeds were always good). I'm going to toss a spare 240GB SSD I have laying around in there (I can connect it to the unused CD-Rom SATA port so as not to lose one of the four main SATA bays).
Overall, a fun experiment to play around with on a slow day, and it all went pretty well.
I put the little guy in my network closet on the opposite side of the house from the server for isolation in case of theft, fire, etc. I must say I've gotten a good little run out of that MicroServer. I bought it used from b-man1 WAY back in 2012. Can't complain.