Side by side
unRAID vs Ansible
unRAID
27 positive (84%) · 3 mixed (9%) · 2 negative (6%)
Trust + time weighted: +80%
AI summary — not a quote
unRAID is a popular NAS operating system favored by the homelab and data hoarding communities for its extreme flexibility with hardware and power efficiency. Users frequently highlight its ability to mix and match hard drive sizes and its feature that spins down idle disks to reduce electricity costs. While it is widely praised for its ease of use in media server setups (like Plex) and automation, recent sentiment is tempered by concerns over changes to its pricing model and a shift toward subscription-based licensing.
Pros
- Supports mixing and matching hard drives of different sizes and brands
- Power-efficient drive management through the ability to spin down idle disks
- Runs directly from a USB flash drive, leaving internal SATA ports free for storage
- Includes a 'preclear' utility for testing new disks and adding them without parity rebuilds
Cons
- Paid software with a perceived trend toward higher prices and subscription models
- May be too resource-intensive for very low-power ARM devices with limited RAM
- Occasional hardware compatibility issues with specific expansion cards
Top excerpts
Bro please get something like unraid setup for this, this hurts me
Unraid sounds really intriguing and potentially ideal for my uses.
I am a media hoarder (142 TB raw Unraid server) if I'm a hoarder.
However you typically trade the flexibility of something like truenas or unraid for whatever the devices OS allows you to do.
I am very happy with the automation setup I have and my main workflow is browsing Letterboxd and learning about movies while and adding those movies to lists which then download
Ansible
13 positive (87%) · 2 mixed (13%) · 0 negative (0%)
Trust + time weighted: +88%
Top excerpts
I'm running an Ubuntu container of Ansible and I'm about to play around with automation
Ansible only requiring SSH access makes it a nice fit to the problem.
Personally, I would choose Ansible, but there is a whole family of similar tools to choose from: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, cfengine, etc.
+1 for ansible. It's built just for problems like this.
I agree with others, an ansible inventory and the ansible-console repl would have done this work across all nodes in several minutes.