Alex (aka Ironic Badger) and Eli (Head of Product at Unraid) recently answered community questions from Reddit regarding the upcoming Unraid 8 release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YokafZ9WVeI

Here are the key takeaways:

Licensing

• Zero changes are coming to existing or new licenses. Basic, Pro, Lifetime, and activation codes remain fully valid, preserving community trust.

Fedora & Universal Blue (UCore)

• Unraid 8 shifts from Slackware to a lightweight, immutable base distro powered by Fedora.
• Expect faster boot times (under 30 seconds), kernel swapping choices, ZFS snapshot-based updates via GRUB for easy rollbacks, and optional Secure Boot.

Plugins & Developers

• Transitioning to an API-driven, modular system with configuration builders and Home Assistant-style permission guardrails.
• Dedicated developer documentation and official code samples will make migration and custom creation seamless.

Apps, Docker Compose & VMs

• Existing apps and VMs will carry over with zero functional regressions.
• Adds native, front-and-center Docker Compose support alongside a live-previewing VM XML editor.

Security & Authentication

• Containers and VMs will no longer run as root by default (moving to QEMU/non-root users) to counter modern AI-era threats.
• Integrates Traefik as a reverse proxy, bringing out-of-the-box OIDC support, with passkeys planned for later point releases.

UI, Drive Management & Testing

• New step-by-step UI wizards will guide users through stressful tasks like drive replacements and parity rebuilding.
• Backed by a brand-new QA department running thousands of automated unit and end-to-end tests.
• A private alpha is launching soon, followed by a public beta targeted for early next year.

Hey guys. I'm on Unraid 7.0.0 (Yeah, I know - I just haven't had an upgrade go well so I haven't done it in a while).

My server consisted of four 6TB Seagate IronWolf drives and an SSD cache drive.
One of the 6TB drives is parity, the other are data drives.
This morning I lost one of the 6TB data drives. I tried swapping SATA and power cables but no luck. I get the old death-click on POST and the BIOS says that SATA slot is empty so she's dead.

I have an 8TB drive lying around so I think I'll use that - and you can probably see where this question is going now.

The parity drive needs to be the largest hard drive so I can't simply replace the failed 6TB drive with an 8TB drive.

As I'm typing this out I'm realizing that I probably need to add the 8TB as a 2nd parity drive, wait for the array re-build, then change the 6TB parity drive to a data drive.
That'll leave me with three 6TB data drives (as it was before) and an 8TB data parity drive.

Is this the way to go? Any gotchas I need to know about?

I've had problems with Frigate where it chews up all available memory (96GB) on my Unraid server. Lately it's been running fine with no issues (for at least a month), which I attribute to the previous update fixing whatever the problem was. Day before yesterday I was notified that there was an update for the Frigate container, so I ran it, and now the memory problems are back... container crashed within a couple hours. How do I go back to the previous update? I read a thread that tells me to go to the maintainer website and choose the tagged image version I want, but it looks like there's a new tagged version every few minutes, so I have no idea which one I'm supposed to choose. Any help?