Essential Unraid Apps

In the first part of this series, I mentioned some of the apps I installed when setting up Unraid. This time, I’ll go deeper into the ones I consider essential — apps that improve reliability, reduce power draw, and automate tedious tasks.

• Appdata Backup (opens in a new tab)
  • I use it to backup both appdata and the USB flash drive. That backup is also periodically copied to an offsite location. I don’t want to deal with setting up everything from scratch again in the future, so this is surely my most important app to have!
• Parity Check Tuning (opens in a new tab)
  • With this app you can split up the parity check into increments, it’ll save the progress (so you can stop and resume in between reboots), and it can run it only during a specific time frame, e.g. night time.

• AutoTweak (opens in a new tab)
  • Use this to tweak certain power settings and lower the power consumption of your server.
• Intel GPU TOP (opens in a new tab)
  • If you have an Intel CPU with iGPU, install this one for sure. With it you can use hardware encoding/decoding in apps like Plex, Jellyfin or Emby.

• Dynamix Stop Shell (opens in a new tab)
• Fix Common Problems (opens in a new tab)
  • This app will scan your server and helps detect common configuration issues before they cause problems. It’s nice that it links to explanations and also allows you to ignore certain things (if you know what you’re doing). I personally didn’t need to ignore anything, all suggestions were reasonable.
• Tips and Tweaks (opens in a new tab)
• Unassigned Devices (opens in a new tab), Unassigned Devices Plus (opens in a new tab), and USB Manager (opens in a new tab)
  • With the combination of these apps I was able to transfer data from external hard drives (with differing file formats) onto the Unraid array through USB.
• User Scripts (opens in a new tab)
  • You can run cron jobs for things like deleting .DS_Store files. But you can pretty much do anything with these scripts, so it’s worthwhile to investigate what the community has built, e.g. on Reddit (opens in a new tab).

I wouldn’t consider them essential but they are definitely nice to have. They make debugging easier and show some useful information on the dashboard.

• Dynamix Cache Directories (opens in a new tab)
• Dynamix System Buttons (opens in a new tab)
• Dynamix System Information (opens in a new tab)
• Dynamix System Statistics (opens in a new tab)
• Dynamix System Temperature (opens in a new tab)
• File Activity (opens in a new tab)
• iotop (C Version) for UNRAID (opens in a new tab)
• ITE IT87 Driver (opens in a new tab) and Nuvoton NC6687 Driver (opens in a new tab)
• Open Files (opens in a new tab)