Ladies and Gentlemen on the unRAID forums I have some rather exciting news to announce...

unRAID has been converted to run in 64 bit, natively on Arch Linux, with full type 1 hypervisor support for KVM and Xen.

Right then, OK. So this was not an easy task and for that reason I will not be releasing a howto guide, instead the aim is make this a really user friendly project by releasing an entire 'customised' distribution with all the hard work already done. This will likely take me a few weeks, maybe longer, to accomplish but I'll making test releases available as soon as is sensible to do so. Huge, huge thanks to my grumpy friend for helping make this a reality. There are many, many reasons why this is a huge step forward for the unRAID product so let me list a few for you now...

• Speed - I am achieving roughly a 30% increase on the same hardware over stock unRAID speeds. With these 2 old drives I conducted my tests with I acheived roughly 85Mb/s parity speeds, but as you can see below that has increased to almost 110Mb/s! Not bad, but shows how limiting the 32 bit version of unRAID and it's old kernel really is.

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• Latest Kernels and Patches - unRAID is quite a long way behind kernel wise, and you're missing out on security patches, speed increases and bug fixes as a result. "ArchRAID" or whatever you want to call is running 3.12-1 a bang up to date version. You're not reliant on one developer deciding whether or not to include a certain patch, kernel flag or software. As it's Linux (any old distro will do) you're free to install any software you want, free'd from the shackles of a USB thumb (if you want to be). It's worth noting my test system is entirely running off two flash drives. I'm not trying to bash on Tom here, but there's only so far a one man development model can take you, and with the lack of progress on the 64 bit version I've seen publicly to date I wanted to see just how hard it was. Turns out, not very. emhttp is still 32-bit granted but that's not open sourced so I can't modify it (besides that's what you pay for with your license).

• Flash Drive - Yes, you still need to pay for unRAID. I'm not out here to let people steal Tom's work I'm merely repackaging his open sourced code and emhttp on top of a 64bit OS, something he's not done despite user requests for many, many years. I do not condone piracy of this software, nor should any requests be made to me to do so. The flash GUID is passed through automatically by the OS naturally, as there's no emulation layer in the way like with a VM.

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• Native Hypervisor support - This is where my release will blow any other NAS product out of the water. Type 1 hypervisors are natively support which means KVM and Xen. unRAID itself becomes the host OS so everything else runs natively on top of that, if you understand the power of this single fact you'll understand why I'm so excited to share it with you all. On top of that, unRAID storage is immediately available to the OS (no need to wait for a VM to load up etc) and thus can be used to run your VMs etc (although performance may not be fantastic that way). Samba, NFS etc all work the way you'd expect.

• Software / Plugins - It's Linux, full Linux. You can install whatever the hell you want. If you want a desktop, install it. If you want XBMC fullscreen with TBs of storage on the SAME OS, install it. If you want to remain headless, IT'S YOUR CHOICE. On top of all this my distro package will allow users to customise their installs at download time using something similar to OpenSUSE studio so you can choose at download time what you want - that said, it's Linux so you can change whatever you want after the fact. It's all manageable via bit of software such as webmin, pictured below.

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Future Plans / Roadmap

As my Uni work winds down over the Xmas period you can expect a flurry of updates, except for the weeks I'm at my parents house! The current state of the project is not ready for a public release, many paths are broken and some things don't quite work in the most user friendly of fashions. My aim is to make a project which is suitable for Linux newbies, I'll document the whole install process and make available for download a custom .ISO file via .torrent. I aim to have something ready by the very early parts of the New Year. Don't hold me to that other priorities come first and this isn't going to help me pass my exams!!

I cannot wait to see what you guys make of this and hope to generate a massive amount of interest and hopefully involve Tom in this. It's aimed at making his product better anyway!
Future Plans / Roadmap
As my Uni work winds down over the Xmas period you can expect a flurry of updates, except for the weeks I'm at my parents house! The current state of the project is not ready for a public release, many paths are broken and some things don't quite work in the most user friendly of fashions. My aim is to make a project which is suitable for Linux newbies, I'll document the whole install process and make available for download a custom .ISO file via .torrent. I aim to have something ready by the very early parts of the New Year. Don't hold me to that other priorities come first and this isn't going to help me pass my exams!!

I cannot wait to see what you guys make of this and hope to generate a massive amount of interest and hopefully involve Tom in this. It's aimed at making his product better anyway!
As my Uni work winds down over the Xmas period you can expect a flurry of updates, except for the weeks I'm at my parents house! The current state of the project is not ready for a public release, many paths are broken and some things don't quite work in the most user friendly of fashions. My aim is to make a project which is suitable for Linux newbies, I'll document the whole install process and make available for download a custom .ISO file via .torrent. I aim to have something ready by the very early parts of the New Year. Don't hold me to that other priorities come first and this isn't going to help me pass my exams!!
I cannot wait to see what you guys make of this and hope to generate a massive amount of interest and hopefully involve Tom in this. It's aimed at making his product better anyway!
I cannot wait to see what you guys make of this and hope to generate a massive amount of interest and hopefully involve Tom in this. It's aimed at making his product better anyway!