COMING FROM
Coming from Unraid
Unraid pioneered the mixed-drive NAS. Here is what changes when you move, and what stays the same.
What Unraid got right
Unraid solved the mixed-drive problem elegantly — parity protection without requiring matched disks. The community plugins ecosystem is mature, and the USB boot key model is clever. It's been the default for homelab NAS builders for years.
What changes for you
Run more than one box and a dead one does not take your apps and virtual machines down with it. Rehome starts them on another node, and brings them home when the box is back.
Ask the box what is wrong. Nova reads the box's state and answers in plain words, so you are not clicking through screens to work out which part failed.
Your array disks stay plain ext4 or XFS with whole files on them, so they mount and read on any Linux box. The App Store is built from the same community app feed you already browse.
Migration
If you're running Unraid and want to switch:
- Back up your data
- Eight.ly supports SnapRAID + MergerFS — same mixed-drive concept as Unraid's parity, different implementation
- Download the Eight.ly OS ISO and boot on the same hardware
- Reconfigure your drives in the Eight.ly NAS panel
- Redeploy containers from the 3,400+ app catalog — most Unraid templates have an Eight.ly equivalent