Four Bullets and OHB, if you didn't know. Plus Lockwood makes a really good whiskey and an even better chicken tender

This week I started my journey migrating from Windows Server to unRAID, basically knowing nothing about Linux and learning along the way. I thought other people might find my journey (and mistakes) helpful, so I'm chronicling it here.

TL;DR: Linux noob migrates home server from Windows to Unraid. Mistakes were made, more to come.

Background

I'm not a novice with computers, having used Windows and even DOS since the dark times (literally, the screen was mostly black on DOS), and probably before half the Redditors reading this were born. But I've never needed or wanted to learn Linux, and the longer I went without dipping my toes into it, the scarier and weirder it seemed.

I have a "Server of Theseus" that's been going in one form or another since the Windows Home Server days. WHS was a great product that combined the ease of use of an appliance with actual server tech, plus HDD redundancy in case of failure. So, of course, because it was a fantastic product, Microsoft refused to market it and killed it.

After that I switched to Windows Server Essentials 2012 with a valid HUP license, but that wouldn't work on modern hardware when I finally needed an upgrade. So I "trialed" Windows Server Essentials 2019 and have been using it unlicensed ever since. Microsoft basically lets you use Windows Server without an active license for personal use, as long as you aren't running a company off of it and you don't mind not being able to change the desktop wallpaper. Windows Server always seemed like overkill for a basic media server, but it's worked for me for several years.

When I was running Windows, I was using StableBit DrivePool to pool disparate HDDs into one big pool, which held all my server shares. Really, really fantastic software that picks up where Microsoft and Storage Pool from WHS left off. DrivePool also handles file duplication really gracefully, so if a HDD fails you can just pop in a new one and not even skip a beat.

Use Case

My home server is primarily a media server and centralized document drive. Mostly used for Jellyfin and occasionally other media applications. I also use it as my primary document store for files, with basically nothing kept on my desktop or laptop. It's backed up to a physical drive monthly, and cloud backed up to CrashPlan Pro (because literally no one else that I found offers unlimited cloud storage for backups on a server OS and I have a LOT of UHD full disc rips).

Why Unraid?

I've been wanting to expand the capabilities of my server for a while and even thought about tinkering with Podman or Docker Desktop to start running Docker containers on my server. But besides the fact that I didn't have a valid Windows license and the other pains that come with running an enterprise server OS at home (lack of driver support was a somewhat common issue), I've always been a little bit wary of running services and apps directly in Windows. I'd always understood Linux to be a lot more solid and when you look up "StableBit DrivePool Linux alternatives", Unraid and TrueNAS are generally at the top of the list, along with SnapRAID.

Unraid advertises itself as a simple but powerful headless server, which is exactly what I'm looking for in a home server OS. I was a little wary about the way it handles file duplication (array parity vs. DrivePool's file duplication), but after doing some deep dives and reading a lot of Reddit posts about it, I settled on an Unraid trial and decided to give it a shot.

The (current) hardware

The server is currently running on a self-built Ryzen 4600G with a Radeon IGP on a Gigabyte B450 motherboard with 16 GB of RAM, 4 internal HDDs of varying sizes and speeds, 3 external HDDs, and one NVMe. So, not a beast, but plenty for my use case. Windows Server 2019 ran pretty solidly, booting nearly instantly on the NVMe and basically never crashing. The server is headless except for, well, migration.

Week Zero: Migration and Mistakes

One of the first mistakes I made was deciding to change my local backup solution from Duplicati to Kopia before the migration. There wasn't anything wrong with Duplicati, I just wanted to try Kopia, and my undiagnosed but likely adult ADHD meant that making one change means making ALL THE CHANGES. But, that also meant zeroing out my local backup drive and starting fresh, and waiting for Kopia to run and compress TBs of data, causing me to lose a day. In hindsight, that could have been something that happened after the server migration. One major change at a time, kids.

I also swapped out the oldest and smallest HDD inside the server case for a newly shucked 8TB model, and while doing so gave it a good compressed air dusting. But I neglected to hold the case fan in place while dusting and I guess I ruined the motor, because when I started it back up, the case fan stopped working. So, lesson learned there as well. I replaced it with a dead quiet Arctic 120mm and got one for the front to keep the hot hot hard drives nice and cool, too. But this also cost me a lot of time.

Lastly, I spent a lot of time winding down my DrivePool and consolidating files since they were spread out through the whole pool. I de-duplicated first, which I probably shouldn't have done, because I couldn't take advantage of read striping when writing to different disks. And then I still used File Explorer moves to get my folders off the Pool and to the root of a couple of the drives, consolidating them. This took a very long time and caused a lot of unnecessary HDD thrashing.

What I didn't understand is that I could have just taken the files out of their DrivePool hidden folders and put them in the root of the HDDs instantly. As long as the folders are identically named, when you bring them into an array in Unraid, the folders on each drive would be merged into the auto-created share, and I didn't have to spend all that time and effort consolidating them before the migration.

Unraid first impressions

After all that, I finally got Unraid 7.2.5 set up and running on the server with the trial. Here are just some quick, unordered thoughts using it for a couple of days:

• Unraid is fairly user friendly, but there's still a learning curve, especially if you're not familiar at all with Linux. You might need to at least learn the very very basics of Linux and Bash (everything's directory!)
• I do like that there's a web interface so you don't have to RDP in. But the web interface isn't terrifically fast, and even though it's "responsive" it's not the best on a phone. The UX also needs some love before it can see more broad adoption by "normies".
• Array parity building took ~22 hours for an 8TB parity drive.
• Because of the bad way I consolidated my files, I ran into some trouble trying to merge my movies back together in the share.
  • Lesson learned: The Unraid web browser file manager doesn't do a good job of "knowing" where files are and will attempt a physical file move when it doesn't need to, even in user space
  • Lesson learned: Linux really doesn't like when you try and merge identically named folders, even in user space. Just move the files instead of trying to merge the folders the way you can in Windows.
  • Lesson learned: Midnight Commander (mc) is incredibly intuitive and very easy to pick up, and so, so much faster than trying to use the web browser file manager.
• Installing and managing Docker community apps is incredibly easy
• Tailscale and out-of-the-box UPS integration are both pretty great
• Googling for help is really difficult. Unraid has been through a lot of changes over the years and forum and reddit posts age like milk. The documentation is good, but not amazing, so when you hit a problem that isn't entirely clear or covered by the docs, you've got so sift through a lot of old stuff.

Unraid Array vs. StableBit DrivePool performance

One thing that's not so great is array speed. Write speed and just general HDD performance is less than half what I was getting with DrivePool. I understand that a lot of that is due to the fundamental difference of how DrivePool works vs. a parity drive, but I wasn't prepared to actually be able to notice the difference, even with file navigation.

Currently, all my shares are Array only. I know that one way to potentially increase performance is to utilize the cache and mover, but I'm a little hesitant to do that. I don't love the idea of files on the cache getting out of sync in case of a problem, and I'm also a little wary of the extra write cycles on the SSD, given the current prices of replacements. I still might try it just to see how much of a difference it makes, but I do miss the simplicity of DrivePool (and I don't understand why someone hasn't made a Linux clone that functions the same way).

What's Next?

Now that everything is up and running, I intend to maximize the trial of Unraid to see if I want to stick with it. I'll try some other services (maybe Immich next) and see how they fly.

I'm really going to be evaluating Unraid, though, and deciding if I want to stick with it. Unraid licenses aren't inexpensive, and you can get a valid Windows 11 Pro license on the cheap. So I'll be deciding if I want to stick with Unraid or migrate back to Windows 11 Pro and just run Windows 11 headless as a server with DrivePool and some kind of Docker manager with WSL (bonus: container data is portable so migration back won't be quite as difficult).

In my Google Home history, it says that I disconnected SmartThings today. Except, I did no such thing.

I combed through my Google account and everything seems good, no suspicious signed in devices, although I am always greeted with a cacophony of warning notifications on any new sign ins anyway.

So the only thing I did even vaguely SmartThings related around the time this was logged was adjust the thermostat through Google Home. Is it possible that this could cause some kind of bug? Anyone else see this show up in their Google home history?

This week I started my journey migrating from Windows Server to unRAID, basically knowing nothing about Linux and learning along the way. I thought other people might find my journey (and mistakes) helpful, so I'm chronicling it here.

TL;DR: Linux noob migrates home server from Windows to Unraid. Mistakes were made, more to come.

Background

I'm not a novice with computers, having used Windows and even DOS since the dark times (literally, the screen was mostly black on DOS), and probably before half the Redditors reading this were born. But I've never needed or wanted to learn Linux, and the longer I went without dipping my toes into it, the scarier and weirder it seemed.

I have a "Server of Theseus" that's been going in one form or another since the Windows Home Server days. WHS was a great product that combined the ease of use of an appliance with actual server tech, plus HDD redundancy in case of failure. So, of course, because it was a fantastic product, Microsoft refused to market it and killed it.

After that I switched to Windows Server Essentials 2012 with a valid HUP license, but that wouldn't work on modern hardware when I finally needed an upgrade. So I "trialed" Windows Server Essentials 2019 and have been using it unlicensed ever since. Microsoft basically lets you use Windows Server without an active license for personal use, as long as you aren't running a company off of it and you don't mind not being able to change the desktop wallpaper. Windows Server always seemed like overkill for a basic media server, but it's worked for me for several years.

When I was running Windows, I was using StableBit DrivePool to pool disparate HDDs into one big pool, which held all my server shares. Really, really fantastic software that picks up where Microsoft and Storage Pool from WHS left off. DrivePool also handles file duplication really gracefully, so if a HDD fails you can just pop in a new one and not even skip a beat.

Use Case

My home server is primarily a media server and centralized document drive. Mostly used for Jellyfin and occasionally other media applications. I also use it as my primary document store for files, with basically nothing kept on my desktop or laptop. It's backed up to a physical drive monthly, and cloud backed up to CrashPlan Pro (because literally no one else that I found offers unlimited cloud storage for backups on a server OS and I have a LOT of UHD full disc rips).

Why Unraid?

I've been wanting to expand the capabilities of my server for a while and even thought about tinkering with Podman or Docker Desktop to start running Docker containers on my server. But besides the fact that I didn't have a valid Windows license and the other pains that come with running an enterprise server OS at home (lack of driver support was a somewhat common issue), I've always been a little bit wary of running services and apps directly in Windows. I'd always understood Linux to be a lot more solid and when you look up "StableBit DrivePool Linux alternatives", Unraid and TrueNAS are generally at the top of the list, along with SnapRAID.

Unraid advertises itself as a simple but powerful headless server, which is exactly what I'm looking for in a home server OS. I was a little wary about the way it handles file duplication (array parity vs. DrivePool's file duplication), but after doing some deep dives and reading a lot of Reddit posts about it, I settled on an Unraid trial and decided to give it a shot.

The (current) hardware

The server is currently running on a self-built Ryzen 4600G with a Radeon IGP on a Gigabyte B450 motherboard with 16 GB of RAM, 4 internal HDDs of varying sizes and speeds, 3 external HDDs, and one NVMe. So, not a beast, but plenty for my use case. Windows Server 2019 ran pretty solidly, booting nearly instantly on the NVMe and basically never crashing. The server is headless except for, well, migration.

Week Zero: Migration and Mistakes

One of the first mistakes I made was deciding to change my local backup solution from Duplicati to Kopia before the migration. There wasn't anything wrong with Duplicati, I just wanted to try Kopia, and my undiagnosed but likely adult ADHD meant that making one change means making ALL THE CHANGES. But, that also meant zeroing out my local backup drive and starting fresh, and waiting for Kopia to run and compress TBs of data, causing me to lose a day. In hindsight, that could have been something that happened after the server migration. One major change at a time, kids.

I also swapped out the oldest and smallest HDD inside the server case for a newly shucked 8TB model, and while doing so gave it a good compressed air dusting. But I neglected to hold the case fan in place while dusting and I guess I ruined the motor, because when I started it back up, the case fan stopped working. So, lesson learned there as well. I replaced it with a dead quiet Arctic 120mm and got one for the front to keep the hot hot hard drives nice and cool, too. But this also cost me a lot of time.

Lastly, I spent a lot of time winding down my DrivePool and consolidating files since they were spread out through the whole pool. I de-duplicated first, which I probably shouldn't have done, because I couldn't take advantage of read striping when writing to different disks. And then I still used File Explorer moves to get my folders off the Pool and to the root of a couple of the drives, consolidating them. This took a very long time and caused a lot of unnecessary HDD thrashing.

What I didn't understand is that I could have just taken the files out of their DrivePool hidden folders and put them in the root of the HDDs instantly. As long as the folders are identically named, when you bring them into an array in Unraid, the folders on each drive would be merged into the auto-created share, and I didn't have to spend all that time and effort consolidating them before the migration.

Unraid first impressions

After all that, I finally got Unraid 7.2.5 set up and running on the server with the trial. Here are just some quick, unordered thoughts using it for a couple of days:

• Unraid is fairly user friendly, but there's still a learning curve, especially if you're not familiar at all with Linux. You might need to at least learn the very very basics of Linux and Bash (everything's directory!)
• I do like that there's a web interface so you don't have to RDP in. But the web interface isn't terrifically fast, and even though it's "responsive" it's not the best on a phone. The UX also needs some love before it can see more broad adoption by "normies".
• Array parity building took ~22 hours for an 8TB parity drive.
• Because of the bad way I consolidated my files, I ran into some trouble trying to merge my movies back together in the share.
  • Lesson learned: The Unraid web browser file manager doesn't do a good job of "knowing" where files are and will attempt a physical file move when it doesn't need to, even in user space
  • Lesson learned: Linux really doesn't like when you try and merge identically named folders, even in user space. Just move the files instead of trying to merge the folders the way you can in Windows.
  • Lesson learned: Midnight Commander (mc) is incredibly intuitive and very easy to pick up, and so, so much faster than trying to use the web browser file manager.
• Installing and managing Docker community apps is incredibly easy
• Tailscale and out-of-the-box UPS integration are both pretty great
• Googling for help is really difficult. Unraid has been through a lot of changes over the years and forum and reddit posts age like milk. The documentation is good, but not amazing, so when you hit a problem that isn't entirely clear or covered by the docs, you've got so sift through a lot of old stuff.

Unraid Array vs. StableBit DrivePool performance

One thing that's not so great is array speed. Write speed and just general HDD performance is less than half what I was getting with DrivePool. I understand that a lot of that is due to the fundamental difference of how DrivePool works vs. a parity drive, but I wasn't prepared to actually be able to notice the difference, even with file navigation.

Currently, all my shares are Array only. I know that one way to potentially increase performance is to utilize the cache and mover, but I'm a little hesitant to do that. I don't love the idea of files on the cache getting out of sync in case of a problem, and I'm also a little wary of the extra write cycles on the SSD, given the current prices of replacements. I still might try it just to see how much of a difference it makes, but I do miss the simplicity of DrivePool (and I don't understand why someone hasn't made a Linux clone that functions the same way).

What's Next?

Now that everything is up and running, I intend to maximize the trial of Unraid to see if I want to stick with it. I'll try some other services (maybe Immich next) and see how they fly.

I'm really going to be evaluating Unraid, though, and deciding if I want to stick with it. Unraid licenses aren't inexpensive, and you can get a valid Windows 11 Pro license on the cheap. So I'll be deciding if I want to stick with Unraid or migrate back to Windows 11 Pro and just run Windows 11 headless as a server with DrivePool and some kind of Docker manager with WSL (bonus: container data is portable so migration back won't be quite as difficult).

I'm just starting out with Unraid and new to it from the world of Windows, so please be patient with me.

When I moved my movies folder from my old Windows server, all my movies wouldn't fit on a single disk so I created two folders, "Movies" and "Movies Part Two" (in hindsight this was a mistake, I should have left them both as "Movies" and Unraid would have figured it out).

EDIT: to specify, these two folders have wound up as separate shares in Unraid. I'm trying to merge all the files into one share, I honestly don't care what disk they're on in the array.

Now I'm trying to get everything in the "Movies Part Two" folder into the Movies folder. However, whenever I use Unraid's GUI file manager and try to move the folder from one share to the other (which is what everything says you're supposed to do), Unraid apparently tries to physically move the files, which is taking an extraordinarily long time (due to the ongoing parity sync, I assume).

Is this because there are folders that have the same name? What am I doing wrong, exactly? If I move files by themselves between folders in a share, or even between shares, it seems to work as expected. But if I move the whole folder at once, this happens.

Trying to merge the elf folder from Movies Part Two to Movies. Note they're both user shares, not doing user to disk as I understand that's a big no-no.

Does anyone have a mortgage broker they've worked with in Richardson or nearby who they had an amazing experience with?