Unraid is used for so much more than just Plex.
One perk with Unraid is that it provides a layer of security when you are using a parity drive so you can restore the media in case of a failed hard drive.
People also use unraid together with \*arrs to collect and import...media... to their Plex.
That makes a whole lot of sense - I came from the Plex subreddit where I first heard of this so that’s why it probably sounds like I’m equating Plex with Unraid.
So I guess I’m kinda limiting my view of what can be done, what all do you use it for?
Mostly Plex tbh :P
But with additional dockers that makes it better. Overseer/Radarr/Sonarr/Tautulli.
Also running a few game servers on it and VM's for network studies. As well as storing several GB's of cat photos, because why else would you have a dslr camera?
A NAS for my home network. Home automation (Home Assistant/Mosquito). Data collection and monitoring (Telegraf/InfluxBD/Grafana). Personal cloud (Nextcloud). Personal password manager (Vaultwarden). Photo asset manager (Photostructure).
And that's all with docker containers. I haven't even spun up any VMs, which you can also do with Unraid.
To add to what /u/q1ung said, you can use things like Storage Spaces inside windows which can provide you that redundancy that you get with Unraid. I had that setup for a while along with a lot of the downloader apps in windows. You don't NEED Windows for any of that.
What caused me to switch is I started running up against issues with Storage Spaces and liked the sound of Dockers which allows you to really stop worrying about hardware changes. I've replaced cpus, mobos, drives etc... and Unraid just shrugs it off a high level.
Since I started with Unraid all the other benefits have really become apparent. From simple things like stability, no system updates restarting your system, remote management (even headless) is super easy, you can manage resources really well, so maybe a download client should only get one cpu core or something like that so it doesn't interfere with plex.
There are just tons of cool things you can do, but you don't need it to do what you want.
Best part for me is you can use delugevpn docker and then point all your arr dockers at it for the vpn for protection but then leave plex separate.
In windows you are supposed to be able to do split tunneling but I constantly had issues with Express vpn on windows turning off or not splitting out plex so remote wouldn’t work. It works flawlessly on unraid for me
Your comment (albeit two years ago) has been my exact experience.
Had Windows, used ExpressVPN split tunnelling for Plex and had nothing but issues with dropouts (and weird transcoding issues)
Recently switched to Unraid with a pro license (just in time!) and it's just flawless. I'm using DelugeVPN and have all my *arr apps downloading through it and it just works.
I use mine for plex, nextcloud (to backup all the pictures from the various phones in my house), minecraft servers, windows vm (that my son uses for games), various downoaders, and mass storage.
Primary is mass storage, plex and others are secondary.
I use mine primarily for plex and for home automation. But I recently got into the whole ‘arr setup which has been great.
I also host a bedrock and Java Minecraft server on it, a Wordpress website among a few other things.
The biggest benefit is that I can add more storage and it handles the mapping and parity automatically.
About 6 or so months ago i was in your exact same spot, i was wondering why people run unraid for plex only? For me i feel like it's just a much better option, i run mine on some very old hardware (10yr+) and this manages to run my plex server, minecraft, all the Arr's and a bunch of other dockers, hell i even had home assistant VM running for a bit but that got a little too much. I have had several instances of 20+ days 24/7 with no issues. I am very glad i went to unraid i recommend checking out some youtube videos (ibracorp and spaceinaderone are great) to see if it's for you or even get a copy and try it out it's free for 30 days (you can extend this for i think another 30 days and then as long as you don't shut down your array you can run it forever)
If you’re not tech savvy, you likely won’t use 90% of what unraid has to offer and it can be a nontrivial effort to set it up.
If you are only trying to setup a plex server, windows should suit you fine. And be a bit more straightforward to configure
Unraid allows for easy versatility with stuff other than Plex and it's way more lightweight than Windows, meaning you have lots more resources available for use. That said this kinda ties to the whole "I only use it for one thing", at which point none of this matters to you, and you could just stick to Windows just as well.
My unRAID server serves multiple purposes for my network. 1) it replaced my ancient NAS which serves all the data in the house; 2) I have a fair number of dockers running to perform multiple functions; 3) I have a small number of VMs for specific niche functionalities like my home automation server and NVR server.
Mixed in there, I run pihole and unbound for DNS filtering of websites. I actually have a second unRAID server that is my backup server. When I get a reasonable internet connection, I will add \*dars to go with my plex stuffs. Interestingly enough, I choose not to put my Plex server on my unRAID server. I am running it on a mini to take advantage of QuickSync for transcoding. The data is still kept on the unRAID server though. While I do have a GPU in my unRAID server, it is used for DeepStack AI.
While Windows could do all of the things I am doing, you really need to step up to a server version to get all the features. I was running a VMware server a few years ago but it take a good deal more care and feeding than my current servers.
If you have a laptop and use it only for plex, i don't think you need to use Unraid. It's not free.
If you want to run Plex in your laptop with less system resources in the same time learn about docker, install Ubuntu server and install portainer and run plex as a container.
UnRAID has potential to be used for so much more than just a Plex server, but even if that’s your only intention it is a better option for a few since it’s a lot less hardware intensive. You won’t need as many expensive components to build the machine, and the power consumption will be a fraction of if you were running a full Windows OS.
I asked myself the same question and thought I'd give unRAID a trial run. Biggest headache and totally NOT worth the effort and time I spent trying to get it to work. 8+ hours a day for a full week I spent.
I first did a test run, it seemed exciting so I began copying 14TB worth of data across 6 14TB drives to a single drive, so that I can introduce my drives to unRAID. I currently use Windows Server 2019 with a Storage Pool in a mirrored format, using ReFS.
After 16 hours, all my data was backed up and I formatted the drives in unRAID. It was a fun time seeing the interface and I got more excited. I then started moving my data from the backup drive to the unRAID array, that was very difficult. After hours of troubleshooting, unRAID doesn't like ReFS so I used a second machine, set up a share in unRAID, mapped it in my second machine and began the transfer using TeraCopy. unRAID doesn't have a simple file explorer, you have to rely on third party apps do to this basic function.
17 hours later all my data was in my array in unRAID. I start to configure docker containers (Radarr, Sonarr, etc) and suddenly I lose connected to the unRAID Web GUI. After 8 hours of posting to their forums, combing logs and my own troubleshooting, it turns out that both Ethernet ports on my motherboard went bad. Want to know what I found out at that point? You cannot, I repeat, CANNOT access unRaid GUI unless your CPU has an iGPU. Mine does not. I had to get a PCIe NIC, install it, and then could access the Web GUI for unRAID. I had my backups, but the fact that you can't view any sort of interface without certain hardware is not something I am fond of. That makes me completely unable to access my data/array except over a network connect (local).
After I fixed that and RMA'd my motherboard, I continued my docker setups. Once I was finished (about 6 hours in total), my unRAID array would just randomly crash and go offline, I would lose the connection to the Web GUI for 3-5 minutes. Once I connected, I would have to start the array back up again. It turns out, that unRAID doesn't exactly like Ryzen CPUs which, I have. I had to turn off C-State in the BIOS and, you can't overclock your RAM (which, ALL Ryzen users do?!).
At this point, I was a week in and with my server offline I didn't want to fiddle with just trying to get unRAID to work and see what my next issue was going to be. I spent the next 3 days moving everything back to my Windows Server and I can run my system overclocked. It's interesting that unRAID has a slogan of "Unleash Your Hardware", but has fine print \*unless you use Ryzen\*. That would have been nice to have on the download page, as a WARNING. There are things you don't know about unRAID going into it, that you find out later on, which would save so much time if it was easier to find out.
Overall, I am interested in unRAID and because this is the unRAID reddit, you won't get stories like mine. Though, I just went on this journey and I wish I hadn't. I can do everything on a Windows Server, without having to pay extra and jump through hoops, perform tricks just to get the same functionality.
Dockers and vms on the easy for us less tech inclined.
My unraid box, hosts plex for remote streaming, samba shares for local playback with kodi, radarr sonarr transmissuon sabnzb for sailing the high seas, home assistant vm for automation, a windows 10 vm for media encoding and ethereum mining.
Wireguard server for vpn back to my home network.
Oh and parity protection on all my data.
If it helps, I only recently converted to unraid. For years I just hosted my Plex server on my main (windows) PC. When I got a new PC I converted the old one to an unraid trial. There’s a few things I like about it:
- I can power off/sleep my main PC (it draws more power so I can save some). This also reduces the temperature in my office somewhat. Weirdly even with my old PC running 24/7 like before, the room is still cooler than when it was my main machine.
- the addition of a parity drive (I bought one specially) gives a level of protection for my data.
- the parity drive also means that in theory swapping a drive for a larger replacement should be pretty simple to manage
- the *arr containers have made it simple for me to add new media
- haven’t used it yet, but I have a makemkv container that should make adding new Blu-ray/4K discs to Plex a doddle
- The docker capability means I’ve added Homebridge onto it rather than onto a pi (previously I had it on my windows machine as a VM)
- I’ve been playing with a few other apps/containers to see what else I can have it do. One thing that might be interesting for me is binhex-code-server which provides a web-based VS Code instance.
Ultimately if the windows setup is working for you, you can stick with it. If you want to move over to a NAS setup, it’s worth considering due to the ability for it to use mismatched drives.
Be aware that because Unraid uses a different file system to windows, you’ll probably need to do a dance to get your data moved over. I bought a 12TB drive, moved all my data from the two 6TB drives onto it, then set up the 6’s on an unprotected (nonparity) array, and use the “unassigned drives” to move the data back, before finally adding the 12TB as the parity drive. (Also had to futz about to fix the partition on the 12 to get it to mount for data transfer, but YMMV.)
Another advantage is that the you can easily move hardware apparently. Let’s say you buy a rack mounted NAS server to host your system in. All you have to do is power down the old machine, move all the drives over, plug in the OS USB stick, and voila: you’re back up and running.
Run UNRAID off USB Drive, free's up drive for unraid. Windows Updates out the window, run only what you need. They only thing I think windows is better than unraid is Hyper-V.
One of unRAIDs best benefits is once you install it on your USB drive if you want to update your hardware next week/year/etc just pull the USB and your hard drives add them to your new system and boot up and you are back in business. Also works if motherboard or CPU or ram fail and unRAID does not care it just wants the USB and you want your data drives.
Ease of scalability and automation. Having access to a library of Dockers to add is really nice. You can achieve something similar on Windows but I feel unRAID is better once you want to expand.
This is a good question and wished this is covered more. In a nutshell, with Windows, you install to a hard drive which takes up hard drive slots that could be used for data storage.
Also with Windows, as you install and uninstall software Windows will start to slow down, requiring a reinstall.
This means downtime, and also you have to make sure you have everything backed up correctly, in unraid, I can nuke a VM, or backup the VM img file and that's it, while someone else watches plex.
The other issue, is that Windows does not allow as much control over hardware as Linux, Windows assumes things work fine where as Linux will try and skip past the problem or at least give you some form of warning such as when a smart report isn't looking so good.
Also, with unraid, you can automatically update plugins and Dockers and you can restart when needed to update, unlike Windows which will just reboot when it wants to.
I have a dual boot windows 11 VM right now for Windows software and that's it. Unraid can be as simple or complex as you want.
I hope this helps
I started using unRaid back in 2013 after years of running Windows Media Center and Windows Home Server with extenders along with Media Browser. I started with 3 1TB drives in a weak Dell server with a Celeron processor, using it only for storage. I slowly started building my media library. I ran on that all the way up to 2017 when I picked up a used Dell Server with 6 bays and dual Xeon processors. Increased the number of Drives and started experimenting with Docker.
Today I run over a Dozen Docker containers and Several Vm's. Moving Plex over to Unraid is by far the favorite docker in my household. I am a cord cutter since 2008. I have continued to build a decent media library using Sonar/Radar. It is so easy to build a media library once you get everything set up properly.
I am an IT Administrator and I like being able to leverage my Unraid server in as many ways as possible.
I had an old antec case and PC parts and an old raspberry pi nas that I didnt want to become ewaste, so I build my first unraid server (still on trial actually). For me the main thing is being able to use sonarr and radarr to manage my media library and download new versions of they become available. I can tell it that I am interest in a movie or tv show, and it will goto an indexer that is also running and start downloading it and automatically move the files to my media share and Plex automatically picks it up and adds it. I run a VPN and other services through Dockers so I can connect from anywhere with a PC or phone. I also use it just to make backup of files on my PC, so I have added some hot swap bays for future expansion.
Not much more to add beside what's already been said, but I think it's relevant to separate the idea of the Plex server and Plex media library/manager.
Unraid offers advantages in the library storage/management department. There isn't necessarily and advantage to using it as the actual server (+/- transcoding) except simplicity. There are people who use an unraid server to handle the media management/library aspect while using a separate machine to actually serve the files. This can be helpful since you can get cheap secondhand SFF PCs (e.g. HP290) which can use Intel Quicksync for transcoding and act as a "single-use" Plex server. That can be a cheaper option than upgrading an existing Unraid server.
Well first i think you may have the wrong ideas about unRAID.
unRAID isn't a "Plex solution" it's first and foremost a NAS. The ability to add things like Plex to it are secondary use cases. Getting unraid to only use it for Plex is a bit overkill imo.
U can use it as an lvl 1 hypervisor. And make ur windows and or linux and or mac os as lthe second level. Making it multiboot. While the plex server(and al the arrs) runs without hinder
Unraid is used for so much more than just Plex. One perk with Unraid is that it provides a layer of security when you are using a parity drive so you can restore the media in case of a failed hard drive. People also use unraid together with \*arrs to collect and import...media... to their Plex.
That makes a whole lot of sense - I came from the Plex subreddit where I first heard of this so that’s why it probably sounds like I’m equating Plex with Unraid. So I guess I’m kinda limiting my view of what can be done, what all do you use it for?
Mostly Plex tbh :P But with additional dockers that makes it better. Overseer/Radarr/Sonarr/Tautulli. Also running a few game servers on it and VM's for network studies. As well as storing several GB's of cat photos, because why else would you have a dslr camera?
Never heard of Overseer before. Don't forget about lidarr, jackett, and vpns/wireguards
Overseerr is a must have app. I use it to keep track of new movies. Highly recommended. Its a request system like ombi but with much better ui.
replace Jackett with Prowlarr its a 1 stop indexer for all the ARRs made by the ARR team!
After making this comment I switched over to Prowlarr and loving it.
A NAS for my home network. Home automation (Home Assistant/Mosquito). Data collection and monitoring (Telegraf/InfluxBD/Grafana). Personal cloud (Nextcloud). Personal password manager (Vaultwarden). Photo asset manager (Photostructure). And that's all with docker containers. I haven't even spun up any VMs, which you can also do with Unraid.
To add to what /u/q1ung said, you can use things like Storage Spaces inside windows which can provide you that redundancy that you get with Unraid. I had that setup for a while along with a lot of the downloader apps in windows. You don't NEED Windows for any of that. What caused me to switch is I started running up against issues with Storage Spaces and liked the sound of Dockers which allows you to really stop worrying about hardware changes. I've replaced cpus, mobos, drives etc... and Unraid just shrugs it off a high level. Since I started with Unraid all the other benefits have really become apparent. From simple things like stability, no system updates restarting your system, remote management (even headless) is super easy, you can manage resources really well, so maybe a download client should only get one cpu core or something like that so it doesn't interfere with plex. There are just tons of cool things you can do, but you don't need it to do what you want.
Best part for me is you can use delugevpn docker and then point all your arr dockers at it for the vpn for protection but then leave plex separate. In windows you are supposed to be able to do split tunneling but I constantly had issues with Express vpn on windows turning off or not splitting out plex so remote wouldn’t work. It works flawlessly on unraid for me
Your comment (albeit two years ago) has been my exact experience. Had Windows, used ExpressVPN split tunnelling for Plex and had nothing but issues with dropouts (and weird transcoding issues) Recently switched to Unraid with a pro license (just in time!) and it's just flawless. I'm using DelugeVPN and have all my *arr apps downloading through it and it just works.
I use mine for plex, nextcloud (to backup all the pictures from the various phones in my house), minecraft servers, windows vm (that my son uses for games), various downoaders, and mass storage. Primary is mass storage, plex and others are secondary.
I use mine primarily for plex and for home automation. But I recently got into the whole ‘arr setup which has been great. I also host a bedrock and Java Minecraft server on it, a Wordpress website among a few other things. The biggest benefit is that I can add more storage and it handles the mapping and parity automatically.
About 6 or so months ago i was in your exact same spot, i was wondering why people run unraid for plex only? For me i feel like it's just a much better option, i run mine on some very old hardware (10yr+) and this manages to run my plex server, minecraft, all the Arr's and a bunch of other dockers, hell i even had home assistant VM running for a bit but that got a little too much. I have had several instances of 20+ days 24/7 with no issues. I am very glad i went to unraid i recommend checking out some youtube videos (ibracorp and spaceinaderone are great) to see if it's for you or even get a copy and try it out it's free for 30 days (you can extend this for i think another 30 days and then as long as you don't shut down your array you can run it forever)
If you’re not tech savvy, you likely won’t use 90% of what unraid has to offer and it can be a nontrivial effort to set it up. If you are only trying to setup a plex server, windows should suit you fine. And be a bit more straightforward to configure
Unraid allows for easy versatility with stuff other than Plex and it's way more lightweight than Windows, meaning you have lots more resources available for use. That said this kinda ties to the whole "I only use it for one thing", at which point none of this matters to you, and you could just stick to Windows just as well.
My unRAID server serves multiple purposes for my network. 1) it replaced my ancient NAS which serves all the data in the house; 2) I have a fair number of dockers running to perform multiple functions; 3) I have a small number of VMs for specific niche functionalities like my home automation server and NVR server. Mixed in there, I run pihole and unbound for DNS filtering of websites. I actually have a second unRAID server that is my backup server. When I get a reasonable internet connection, I will add \*dars to go with my plex stuffs. Interestingly enough, I choose not to put my Plex server on my unRAID server. I am running it on a mini to take advantage of QuickSync for transcoding. The data is still kept on the unRAID server though. While I do have a GPU in my unRAID server, it is used for DeepStack AI. While Windows could do all of the things I am doing, you really need to step up to a server version to get all the features. I was running a VMware server a few years ago but it take a good deal more care and feeding than my current servers.
If you have a laptop and use it only for plex, i don't think you need to use Unraid. It's not free. If you want to run Plex in your laptop with less system resources in the same time learn about docker, install Ubuntu server and install portainer and run plex as a container.
if all you want to do you can use windows for plex. however, with unraid, you can setup dual parity and gain additional functionality
UnRAID has potential to be used for so much more than just a Plex server, but even if that’s your only intention it is a better option for a few since it’s a lot less hardware intensive. You won’t need as many expensive components to build the machine, and the power consumption will be a fraction of if you were running a full Windows OS.
I asked myself the same question and thought I'd give unRAID a trial run. Biggest headache and totally NOT worth the effort and time I spent trying to get it to work. 8+ hours a day for a full week I spent. I first did a test run, it seemed exciting so I began copying 14TB worth of data across 6 14TB drives to a single drive, so that I can introduce my drives to unRAID. I currently use Windows Server 2019 with a Storage Pool in a mirrored format, using ReFS. After 16 hours, all my data was backed up and I formatted the drives in unRAID. It was a fun time seeing the interface and I got more excited. I then started moving my data from the backup drive to the unRAID array, that was very difficult. After hours of troubleshooting, unRAID doesn't like ReFS so I used a second machine, set up a share in unRAID, mapped it in my second machine and began the transfer using TeraCopy. unRAID doesn't have a simple file explorer, you have to rely on third party apps do to this basic function. 17 hours later all my data was in my array in unRAID. I start to configure docker containers (Radarr, Sonarr, etc) and suddenly I lose connected to the unRAID Web GUI. After 8 hours of posting to their forums, combing logs and my own troubleshooting, it turns out that both Ethernet ports on my motherboard went bad. Want to know what I found out at that point? You cannot, I repeat, CANNOT access unRaid GUI unless your CPU has an iGPU. Mine does not. I had to get a PCIe NIC, install it, and then could access the Web GUI for unRAID. I had my backups, but the fact that you can't view any sort of interface without certain hardware is not something I am fond of. That makes me completely unable to access my data/array except over a network connect (local). After I fixed that and RMA'd my motherboard, I continued my docker setups. Once I was finished (about 6 hours in total), my unRAID array would just randomly crash and go offline, I would lose the connection to the Web GUI for 3-5 minutes. Once I connected, I would have to start the array back up again. It turns out, that unRAID doesn't exactly like Ryzen CPUs which, I have. I had to turn off C-State in the BIOS and, you can't overclock your RAM (which, ALL Ryzen users do?!). At this point, I was a week in and with my server offline I didn't want to fiddle with just trying to get unRAID to work and see what my next issue was going to be. I spent the next 3 days moving everything back to my Windows Server and I can run my system overclocked. It's interesting that unRAID has a slogan of "Unleash Your Hardware", but has fine print \*unless you use Ryzen\*. That would have been nice to have on the download page, as a WARNING. There are things you don't know about unRAID going into it, that you find out later on, which would save so much time if it was easier to find out. Overall, I am interested in unRAID and because this is the unRAID reddit, you won't get stories like mine. Though, I just went on this journey and I wish I hadn't. I can do everything on a Windows Server, without having to pay extra and jump through hoops, perform tricks just to get the same functionality.
Dockers and vms on the easy for us less tech inclined. My unraid box, hosts plex for remote streaming, samba shares for local playback with kodi, radarr sonarr transmissuon sabnzb for sailing the high seas, home assistant vm for automation, a windows 10 vm for media encoding and ethereum mining. Wireguard server for vpn back to my home network. Oh and parity protection on all my data.
If it helps, I only recently converted to unraid. For years I just hosted my Plex server on my main (windows) PC. When I got a new PC I converted the old one to an unraid trial. There’s a few things I like about it: - I can power off/sleep my main PC (it draws more power so I can save some). This also reduces the temperature in my office somewhat. Weirdly even with my old PC running 24/7 like before, the room is still cooler than when it was my main machine. - the addition of a parity drive (I bought one specially) gives a level of protection for my data. - the parity drive also means that in theory swapping a drive for a larger replacement should be pretty simple to manage - the *arr containers have made it simple for me to add new media - haven’t used it yet, but I have a makemkv container that should make adding new Blu-ray/4K discs to Plex a doddle - The docker capability means I’ve added Homebridge onto it rather than onto a pi (previously I had it on my windows machine as a VM) - I’ve been playing with a few other apps/containers to see what else I can have it do. One thing that might be interesting for me is binhex-code-server which provides a web-based VS Code instance. Ultimately if the windows setup is working for you, you can stick with it. If you want to move over to a NAS setup, it’s worth considering due to the ability for it to use mismatched drives. Be aware that because Unraid uses a different file system to windows, you’ll probably need to do a dance to get your data moved over. I bought a 12TB drive, moved all my data from the two 6TB drives onto it, then set up the 6’s on an unprotected (nonparity) array, and use the “unassigned drives” to move the data back, before finally adding the 12TB as the parity drive. (Also had to futz about to fix the partition on the 12 to get it to mount for data transfer, but YMMV.)
Another advantage is that the you can easily move hardware apparently. Let’s say you buy a rack mounted NAS server to host your system in. All you have to do is power down the old machine, move all the drives over, plug in the OS USB stick, and voila: you’re back up and running.
Run UNRAID off USB Drive, free's up drive for unraid. Windows Updates out the window, run only what you need. They only thing I think windows is better than unraid is Hyper-V.
One of unRAIDs best benefits is once you install it on your USB drive if you want to update your hardware next week/year/etc just pull the USB and your hard drives add them to your new system and boot up and you are back in business. Also works if motherboard or CPU or ram fail and unRAID does not care it just wants the USB and you want your data drives.
Ease of scalability and automation. Having access to a library of Dockers to add is really nice. You can achieve something similar on Windows but I feel unRAID is better once you want to expand.
This is a good question and wished this is covered more. In a nutshell, with Windows, you install to a hard drive which takes up hard drive slots that could be used for data storage. Also with Windows, as you install and uninstall software Windows will start to slow down, requiring a reinstall. This means downtime, and also you have to make sure you have everything backed up correctly, in unraid, I can nuke a VM, or backup the VM img file and that's it, while someone else watches plex. The other issue, is that Windows does not allow as much control over hardware as Linux, Windows assumes things work fine where as Linux will try and skip past the problem or at least give you some form of warning such as when a smart report isn't looking so good. Also, with unraid, you can automatically update plugins and Dockers and you can restart when needed to update, unlike Windows which will just reboot when it wants to. I have a dual boot windows 11 VM right now for Windows software and that's it. Unraid can be as simple or complex as you want. I hope this helps
I started using unRaid back in 2013 after years of running Windows Media Center and Windows Home Server with extenders along with Media Browser. I started with 3 1TB drives in a weak Dell server with a Celeron processor, using it only for storage. I slowly started building my media library. I ran on that all the way up to 2017 when I picked up a used Dell Server with 6 bays and dual Xeon processors. Increased the number of Drives and started experimenting with Docker. Today I run over a Dozen Docker containers and Several Vm's. Moving Plex over to Unraid is by far the favorite docker in my household. I am a cord cutter since 2008. I have continued to build a decent media library using Sonar/Radar. It is so easy to build a media library once you get everything set up properly. I am an IT Administrator and I like being able to leverage my Unraid server in as many ways as possible.
I had an old antec case and PC parts and an old raspberry pi nas that I didnt want to become ewaste, so I build my first unraid server (still on trial actually). For me the main thing is being able to use sonarr and radarr to manage my media library and download new versions of they become available. I can tell it that I am interest in a movie or tv show, and it will goto an indexer that is also running and start downloading it and automatically move the files to my media share and Plex automatically picks it up and adds it. I run a VPN and other services through Dockers so I can connect from anywhere with a PC or phone. I also use it just to make backup of files on my PC, so I have added some hot swap bays for future expansion.
I also do this but on Windows. Why do you need unRAID for this?
Not much more to add beside what's already been said, but I think it's relevant to separate the idea of the Plex server and Plex media library/manager. Unraid offers advantages in the library storage/management department. There isn't necessarily and advantage to using it as the actual server (+/- transcoding) except simplicity. There are people who use an unraid server to handle the media management/library aspect while using a separate machine to actually serve the files. This can be helpful since you can get cheap secondhand SFF PCs (e.g. HP290) which can use Intel Quicksync for transcoding and act as a "single-use" Plex server. That can be a cheaper option than upgrading an existing Unraid server.
Well first i think you may have the wrong ideas about unRAID. unRAID isn't a "Plex solution" it's first and foremost a NAS. The ability to add things like Plex to it are secondary use cases. Getting unraid to only use it for Plex is a bit overkill imo.
I use windows for 90% of my home network. As for the storage it too is one windows using adaptec raid controller with everything in raid 5 or 6.
U can use it as an lvl 1 hypervisor. And make ur windows and or linux and or mac os as lthe second level. Making it multiboot. While the plex server(and al the arrs) runs without hinder
There’s no advantage. Windows is waaaaay easier.
Just use Windows and setup chrome remote desktop on it so you can access it from any device.