Unraid Community Rockstars mgutt and ChatNoir

One of the main reasons why the Unraid community is so great is due to our many Community Rockstars who go above and beyond to help others out. 🤘

In this blog series, we want to put a spotlight on key community members to get to know them a little better and recognize them for all that they've done for the Unraid community over the years.

This next blog features two outstanding community members who have helped out countless new Unraid users over the years.

mgutt joined the forum in 2019 and is an active and helpful moderator (especially in the Unraid German forum).

• Lives in Germany near Bonn and works as a Linux Admin.
• Posts: ~8,000
• Days Won (most liked content): 77

How did you discover Unraid originally?

I came to Unraid in April 2020. At this time I had a 6-Bay Synology NAS which was full because of my fast-growing movie collection and I was disappointed about the power consumption of the constantly running SHR RAID and the high prices of the 8-Bay and even bigger models.

At this time it was clear: I need a custom build NAS / home server.

In the beginning, the plan was to use Open Media Vault (OMV) as the OS, but the GUI looked uncomfortable and most of the setup regarding the installation of applications or upgrading the RAID needed the usage of terminal commands. After starting a thread in a German PC community, the user "v3nom" was the first one that suggested Unraid. The next day I viewed multiple videos on Youtube and finally found one video by "Byte my Bits", which showed the ease of upgrading and spinning down disks and this helped bring me to the decision to use Unraid.

After that, I build an Atom setup and... was disappointed. Not because of Unraid. Instead, I found out that this tiny CPU was not able to transcode movies through Plex properly, as it lacked an iGPU and surprisingly this setup was power-hungry, too. Finally, I changed to a Xeon Workstation setup and everything was perfect.

What is your most liked feature of Unraid?

As we have high electricity costs in Germany, the most important feature of Unraid for me, is the reliable way to automatically spin down unused disks. This saves >50% power compared to any prebuilt NAS model. This is followed by the comfortable way to install and "setup" (does that even exist? ^^) new apps, thanks to the huge Unraid community which created so many Plugins and Docker templates.

What do you like most about being a part of this community?

As we are talking about the Unraid community: I will never forget how patient and helpful this community was after I asked my first (dumb) questions. Today the coolest thing for me is being directly in contact with developers who make Unraid even better. I think Limetech found a good balance between creating Unraid and involving the Open-Source community, which I'm just as proud of as being a member and as moderator of the German Unraid community.
 

What feature would you most like to see added to Unraid?

For the future, I would like to see more enterprise-related features like ZFS in the pool, High-Availability to set up Failover servers, and a license model which allows virtualizing Unraid without a flash drive.

Do you have a donation link you’d like to share?

https://paypal.me/marcgutt

ChatNoir joined the Unraid forum in 2020 and lives near Lyon, France.

• Posts: ~3,000
• Days Won (most liked content): 5
• Even though he has built computers for two decades, he does not work in IT and comes from a mechanical engineering background.

How did you discover Unraid originally?

I think it came to my attention through the Gamers Nexus series (with the help of Wendell from Level1Techs). I was actually seeing some limitations of my old Synology DS414 (power and capacity).

Then the decision of building a server from the ground up came when my previous NAS was getting really full. I looked harder at the subject, what options for hardware, and software and I checked all the Usual Suspects. I looked at the websites, the forums, and youtube and I finally decided on Unraid.

Quick shout out to: b00bytrap, that’s the first channel that I really found showing some details on Unraid at the time. And obviously to SpaceInvader One who provides great content for both beginners and regular users.

What do you like most about being a part of this community?

I could mention the community apps, their great support, or the friendly forum; that would be 100% true, but everyone says that!!!

What I realized is that there is exceptionally little bad advice from users here. That’s super refreshing and probably a key reason for the great community.

What is your most liked feature of Unraid?

I won’t be original and say that’s the flexibility of Array. Compared to TrueNAS’s ZFS it is much more in line with a home user with no or limited Linux knowledge.

What feature would you most like to see added to Unraid?

Honestly, not much on new features as I have very basic needs (storage and a few apps).

When there is stuff that I ‘cannot do’ it’s mainly because I don’t spend the time to actually figure it out (and probably don’t really need them) ;-) but I think that new users (not only them) would benefit from clearer menus and more info in the built-in help. Several times I see people asking for a Feature request when it’s already there but not clearly understood. I remember one occurrence with a display setting that was quite obscure.

Anything else you want to add?

JonathanM, continue with your snarky comments, it makes me laugh every time. 😄

Do you have a donation link you’d like to share?

No