My favorite Parity / Redundancy System

Initial Thoughts

When planning my home lab project, I wanted to create a system that would last a lifetime. Arguably the most important system to achieve that goal was redundant storage. At the time, I didn't know much about how drive systems worked beyond standard RAID. Then, during the home-lab project planning and research phase, I came across Unraid.

What is unraid?

Unraid is a lightweight operating system that can turn your hardware into your own personal NAS or application server without spending big bucks on premade systems. Unraid has plenty of features, but the main one that caught my eye was their storage array system.

Storage System

Their storage system is a unique array that is similar to, yet different from, a normal RAID system. Unraid uses JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) to pool and manage your storage. The key difference is you don't need a physical hardware RAID controller, and you can configure parity to tolerate the loss of one drive without losing data.

Network Share System

Since Unraid manages your drives, you can use its shares feature to make drives or folders accessible across your network using NFS, SMB and other network share protocols. I've implemented this system in my home lab project, binding node 1 and node 2 to different shares for media access and VM backups.

Cache System

Unraid has a cache feature that lets you install an NVMe SSD and use it as a cache. When data is written to the cache—whether it's a download or a large Proxmox backup—the cache SSD handles reads and writes, and on schedule the data is flushed to the hard drives. Typically, write speeds are much faster using the SSD as a middle layer.

Conclusion

Though I've had many issues with Unraid—such as network bind failures and node 2 overheating issues—after those learning curves I have no concerns that the data in my HomeLab and personal projects won't be safe and secure. I also implemented a backup solution using the 3-2-1 rule, and it's been very effective in my day-to-day work.

I would recommend that home lab users — and even small businesses — incorporate Unraid to securely enhance their productivity and data redundancy.