this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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ICYMI, Unraid now supports internal boot and TPM licensing (piefed.blahaj.zone)
submitted 2 days ago by CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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First, I know that Unraid is not FOSS and I'm a month late, just to get that out of the way. But for those that are running Unraid and haven't updated to >7.3.0, there's good reason to (other than for security patches): internal boot and TPM licensing.

This update allows you to boot from an internal drive, no more chewing up flash drives. As a long time Unraid user (for over a decade), this was a long time coming. My server ate several flash drives. Setting it up was a breeze, once I updated to 7.3.x, the wizard to configure it came up and I was able to move it to one of my internal SSDs. All I had to do after that was go into the BIOS and set the boot priority correctly.

Internal boot works without a TPM, however you'd still need the flash drive with your license on it plugged in at boot. If you have a TPM on your server, though, you can migrate your license from your flash to your TPM, with another simple wizard. After migration, you no longer need a boot flash drive.

I had to get a Supermicro AOM-TPM-9665V TPM chip for my motherboard, but I've got it all set now. It's a relief to no longer have to rely on flash drives now - my server's rear exhaust fans were blowing directly on them, causing them to overheat and eventually crash my server.

Unraid posted about this in their blog here: https://unraid.net/blog/unraid-7-3-0

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[–] dan@upvote.au 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is good to know. I haven't had issues with using a USB drive though, since it doesn't receive many reads or writes - the system is copied to a RAM drive on boot and runs off that rather than the USB.

I assume this means I'd need another drive to boot it from? My current setup is that I have 2 x 22TB drives in a ZFS mirror for data storage, and 2 x 2TB NVMe SSDs in a ZFS mirror for things like VMs, Docker containers, documents, etc.

[–] CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah, YMMV on the USB drive. While running Unraid for a little more than a decade, my main server chewed through around 2-3 drives causing crashes each time. It could have been bad luck with the flash lottery, though.

I assume this means I'd need another drive to boot it from?

That is correct. You'd need a drive just for booting, outside of any array or pool that you might have. I bought a tiny 32GB Samsung mSATA SSD for $15 (new) for my transcoding server, and I somehow scored a brand new Micron 250gb 2.5 SSD for ~$25 for my main server (both from ebay) which I use for this purpose.

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

An mSATA or small NVMe in a USB enclosure is the best way to go. No wasting a precious internal slot, and they can be super tiny (2230/2242 enclosures are dime a dozen).

[–] CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago

This is actually what I did for the mSATA! I used an Eluteng USB adapter.

For my main server, though, I have a 36 + 2 2.5in bays, so I was fine using one of those bays for this.