Unraid Vs Nas Plus B2 Functionality

I did find at least one other recent report of similar slowdowns, where only SMB is affected.

Now that Ive had two Unraid servers in production for a while, Ill describe some of the good and not so good I experienced.

Docker allowed me to move all but one of my workloads from VMs to containers, simplifying updates, reducing the memory footprint, and improving performance.

DW Spectrum is the US brand name for the Nx Witness product, and the DW Spectrum branded product is sold in the US.

I chose to switch to Nx Witness, no DW Spectrum, from XProtect because Nx Witness is lighter in resource consumption, easier to deploy, easier to update, has perpetual licenses, includes native remote viewing, and an official Docker release is forthcoming.

I tested CrashPlan Pro and Duplicati containers on Unraid, with Duplicati backing up to Backblaze B2.

Where after 5 days I stopped CrashPlan, when it estimated another 18 days to complete the same backup operation, and it showed the familiar out of memory error.

Unraid Vs Nas Plus B2 Functionality

My B2 storage cost will be a few higher compared to a single seat license for CrashPlan Pro, but the Duplicati plus B2 functionality and speed is superior.

It took several weeks before plugin updates were released that restored full functionality.

It is worth mentioning, again, that I find it strange that Unraid without community provided plugins is really not that usable, but the functionality still remains in community provided plugins, not in Unraid.

Next time I will wait a few weeks for the dust to settle in the plugin community before updating.

But adding and removing disks is still mostly a manual process, and doing it without invalidating parity is very cumbersome and time consuming.

At several times I gave up on the convoluted steps required to add or remove disks without invalidating parity, and just reconfigured the array and then rebuilt parity, hoping nothing goes wrong during the parity rebuild.

This is in my opinion a serious shortcoming, maybe not in technology, but in lack of an easy to use and reliable workflow to help retain redundant protection at all times.

I did move all the data that used to be on the cache to regular storage, including the docker appdata folder.

This should not be a big deal, but I immediately started getting SQLite DB corruption errors in apps like Plex, that store data in SQLite on the appdata share.

After some troubleshooting I found many people complaining about this issue, that seems to have been exasperated by the recent Unraid 6.7.0 update.

Apparently this is a known problem with the Fuse filesystem used by Unraid.

Fuse dynamically spans shares and folders across disks, but apparently breaks file and file-region locking required by SQLite.

The recommended workaround is to put all files that require locking to work on the cache, or on a single disk, effectively bypassing Fuse.

If it is Fuse that breaks file locking behavior, I find it troubling that this is not considered a critical bug.

In Unraid I am using a Docker based Virt-Manager, which seems far less flexible, but more importantly, fails to take snapshots of UEFI based VMs.

Apparently this is a known shortcoming.

I have not looked very hard for alternatives, but this seems to be a serious functional gap compared to Hyper-V or VMWares snapshot capabilities.

This seems to happen when there are other file read operations in progress, and even a few KBs of reads can drastically reduce the array SMB write performance.

Interestingly the issue does not appear to affect my use of rsync between Unraid servers, but only SMB.

Unraid Vs Freenas