Buying a N5 Pro - direction on which os to use.

[Enquiries]

I've post a quick mail together and noted its slighty longer than 900 char so I've pasted it here:

https://pastebin.com/RuG0mcdG


Can you review and comment.

Thanks
Paul

[ed]

Stick with Unraid as the host OS and build out from there. With your lifetime licence and their newer support for ZFS, Docker, VM management, and power efficiency tools, it aligns very well with what you’re aiming for: hybrid NAS/virtualization, lower idle power draw, ease of automation, and active media handling with future AI enhancements.

⸻

Here’s why I’d lean that way:

1. Power Efficiency:
You’re absolutely right — Proxmox isn’t the most efficient when it comes to spinning down drives, suspending idle containers/VMs, or general “quiet mode” use. Unraid, on the other hand, gives you much more granular control here. You can spin down arrays, isolate dockers/VMs on schedule, and easily power-manage via user scripts and community tools.

2. Ease of Management:
It sounds like you want a system that’s reliable and doesn’t require babysitting. Unraid is perfect in this middle ground — you get a decent UI for Docker and VM management, it’s mature enough to handle ZFS now (if you want to go that route), and it’s much less of a faff than building everything on Debian or worrying about Proxmox cluster-style quirks.

3. VM/Docker Use Case:
Unraid’s KVM/QEMU setup is perfectly capable for your needs — Plex, Arr stack, HA, Pi-hole, even a Win11 VM will run without issue, especially on the N5 Pro’s hardware. Proxmox still has the upper hand if you wanted to isolate containers tightly with LXC or build out larger clusters, but that doesn’t sound like your plan anymore.

4. Local AI + LLMs:
This is where the N5 Pro really starts to shine. If you’re dabbling with LLMs locally, Unraid supports NVIDIA and AMD GPU passthrough just fine. You can run something like ollama, local Whisper, or even a small quantized model through Docker or a VM. With the Ryzen AI NPU support becoming more mainstream, I’d expect community plugins or third-party containers to tap into that down the line.

⸻

Optional Hybrid Path?

You could virtualize Unraid under Proxmox and pass through storage, NICs, and GPU, but honestly — unless you’re planning on segmenting the system for multiple roles or doing heavy dev/test VM workloads, it’s just added complexity. Since Unraid is already doing what you need with less power overhead, better idle management, and now supports ZFS, it’s not worth the trouble unless you need those Type 1 virtualization perks again.