Move away from unRAID

After my last post I did a survey of my other boxes and the main other one was a N36L running unRAID 5.04 and serving media using Plex media server. While it performed OK there were niggling things with it where the web GUI would become inaccessible and Plex became unreliable in updating my media library and so on.

So I began looking for alternatives. The media from my unRAID box was played on another HP N40L that had an nVIDIA gpu running OpenELEC (XBMC). When the gpu card died on the N40L last week I decided to move the N36L unRAID setup over to it and try the new 6.06beta with Docker and Xen. It worked OK but the unRAID forums really didn't help me leverage the new features.

It became clear to me that unRAID was in crisis mode. I had only been using it since about September last year choosing to go for a sorted package rather than building my own (again). After searching around I found SnapRAID with mhddfs guides for which are available elsewhere. I'm running it on an Archlinux base system and am finding that also to be quite good. I still prefer openSUSE I must say but Arch is quite good in this setting.

It took me a day or so to get it working in a way where I feel it outperforms the old unRAID system. Plex actually works reliably. I'm streaming content to a Chromecast and it works very well.