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Unraid March Digest 2026
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In this month's digest, Stefano walks through everything that shipped in March, including the @45HomeLab
Unraid Signature Series announcement, Unraid 7.3 Beta updates, and what nearly 3,000 of you told us in the 2026 customer survey.
Links mentioned in this video:
45HomeLab +Unraid Signature Series
2026 Customer Survey Results
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March Digest And Big Partnership
SPEAKER_00Hello and welcome to the Unraid March Digest. I'm your host, Stefano Partita, and we're gonna discuss all things that went down in March. On the last Unraid Digest, I got to tease you guys by announcing that Unraid would be partnering with some unknown entity. And we didn't know who that was at the time, but now that March has come, we do now know in fact that it is 45 Home Lab. 45 Home Lab is a division of 45 Drives, who is known for their enterprise storage solutions, primarily their Storinator series chasis. They spun up 45 Home Lab, which aims to bring the designs and quality of their enterprise equipment to the Home Lab. 45 Home Lab will be selling the Unraid Signature Series server sometime in spring of this year. Now we don't know too many details of exactly what the pricing or even specs of this will be, but it's designed to specifically target what users want most, like media streaming, file storage, containers, VMs, home automation, game servers, security cameras, and local AI. In my personal opinion, I think this is great that we now have an additional route to follow when thinking about purchasing Unraid andor equipment, really, because you can now just buy something off the shelf and know that you're in good hands because 45 drives is known for their build quality as well as their reliability with their equipment. And of course, Unraid, the operating system itself, is pretty robust. And now for some pure speculation on my part, as everything I'm about to say is not grounded in any sort of truth or in fact and is purely speculative from me. So with that being said, I suspect that the 45 Home Lab Unraid Signature Series server won't actually drop until Unraid 7.3 goes public. Now, the reason why I have this suspicion is because if we actually look at the Unraid 7.3 beta 2 release, there's a feature in there that now allows the license to be bound to the TPM on a motherboard. And for anyone that doesn't know what TPM is, that is the trusted platform module that pretty much exists on every modern day motherboard. And what this will allow 45 Home Lab to do is bind a license to that TPM and sell it to you more easily. If you want to be one of the first people in line when the full specs, pricing, and pre-orders go live, there is a way to sign up for early access on the Unrayed website in the blog. Speaking of the beta release, if you are at all interested in participating, you are highly encouraged to do so on a test system that is not production, as in not your main or primary use server. The beta will give you the ability to use internal NVMe, SSDs, EMC, or existing storage drives to boot from. There's no more USB drive requirement. This feature cannot come soon enough with the decline of quality USB flash storage and the lack of availability. Furthermore, you can now bind your license to TPM on your motherboard. Most modern motherboards have a TPM already, and if it doesn't, there's a good chance that your motherboard has a TPM header that will allow you to purchase a TPM and add it to the motherboard. If you wish to go completely flashless, the minimum requirement to use this feature will be TPM 2.0. Otherwise, you're just gonna have to use your flash modules like you always have. For new users, Unraid will automatically select the best available licensing option based on your hardware. If TPM 2.0 is not available, Unraid will fall back to the traditional flash-based licensing. Existing users are not required to change or do anything. The 2026 customer survey results are now available online, and I would highly encourage all of you to go check that out on the Unraid website so you can get a better idea of what the community thinks as a whole. And of course, spoiler alert, the Unraid community is happy with Unraid. Who would have thought? There are three key takeaways though from the survey that the Unraid team noticed. The first being that the web UI needs to be refreshed and modernized. A lot of respondents, 27% specifically, want a faster dashboard, a better file browser, and an interface that works nicely on your phone or tablet. With containers being more popular than ever, 25% of you asked for native Docker Compose support to better help your containerization workflows. Lastly, 26% of you felt that official documentation needed work, and there also needed to be more video content available, which is good because there's already new content on the Uncashed show, and there's more to come, and there's also going to be additional content on Unraid University. For the app of the month, this time we have AI, which uses local AI vision models via Olama to analyze your photos and automatically rename them based on what it actually sees. It generates descriptions, tags, and a fully searchable library all on your own hardware. And if you're not ready to rename anything, there's a catalog mode that builds a searchable database without touching a single file. So it layers cleanly on top of image, Lightroom, or whatever you're already running. And for me, the best part about all of this, if you already have a folder structure that you enjoy, this isn't going to tamper or change any of that. Lastly, don't forget to check out the merch store so you could pick up sweet merch like this when you're on your way to the beach. And of course, don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoy content like this. Thank you all for watching and good night.
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