- Unraid is switching to annual subscription pricing, offering Starter, Unleashed, and Lifetime licenses with optional extension fees for updates.
- Existing Basic, Plus, and Pro licenses can be upgraded to higher levels of perpetual licenses.
- This change may increase revenue for Lime Technology but could also make other NAS providers more appealing to users.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/YCFoR
Not a terrible monetization strategy but I personally don’t want proprietary software
I’m sure there are reasons for using Unraid but the original funky raid alternative they marketed has always struck me as extremely fishy. The kind of solution developed by folks who didn’t know enough about the best practices in storage and decided to roll their own. I guess people like web interfaces too. Personally I’d never use it. Get Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS, learn some Docker, Ansible and Prometheus, deploy and never touch until you break it or the hardware breaks. Throw Webmin on it if you like dancing bears too.
Not everyone interested in self-hosting stuff has the time or is even interested in diving much deeper into it than necessary. That‘s why QNAP and Synology also offer value to homelabers.
Coming from Synology, where I had learned much about docker and CLI, Unraid was the perfect next step for me to get rid of my Sonology‘s shortcomings. And I figure, it won‘t need anything beyond that in the future for me. I‘ve been successfully running quite a lot of services for the whole family being supported by a sufficient GUI and very limited need for CLI.
Yeah, I guess that’s the niche. I would still not trust their homegrown raid scheme though. Making storage systems that don’t eat data is hard. Making it without bugs is impossible. Bugs are found by having someone’s data eaten and fixed over time scaled by the size of the userbase. As a result industry standard systems like mdraid, LVM, ZFS, and more recently Btrfs used in data centers and production applications are statistically guaranteed to eat less data than Unraid’s homegrown solution. I’ve heard it now supports those systems too so if I had to use Unraid, I’d probably be using ZFS for the storage.
It‘s no RAID. Therefore the name. Unraid shows single shares and has different options for filling up drives. So you can access each individual drive via GUI or CLI, however in its functions as a NAS it only shows combined shares. Underneath you got Btrfs, XFS or ZFS as options.
I think their scheme does fall under the RAID definition. I don’t think being able to access individual drives is something that distinguishes RAID from not-RAID since there are standard RAID schemes in which you can access the data in individual drives.
TrueNAS is a better option for purely a NAS
Than Unraid or DIY? I’ve considered SCALE but I’ve never used it. I know they use ZFS so it will almost certainly eat less data than Unraid’s homegrown raid.
I do like dancing bears…
I may be misreading your post, but it seems like your argument against Unraid is that they “rolled their own” which is why you’d never use it and instead “roll your own”?
I think the difference is at what level:
- don’t implement your own storage redundancy system at the kernel level with a small team in a closed-source fashion, because that’s the kind of thing that needs many eyes, lots of experience and many millions of hours real-world usage to fully debug and make sure it work.
- do build your own system by combining pre-existing technologies that are built by experienced teams and tested/vetted by wide/popular usage.
I feel OPs critique has some truth to it. I personally would rather stay with raidz by zfs, exactly because of it’s open nature (yes, they too have bugs, nothing is perfect).
This is what I meant. ☝️ If they had merely wrapped LVM/mdraid or ZFS in a nice packaging my argument wouldn’t stand. They would have had equivalent data reliability to TrueNAS.
As a software developer (who’s looked at ZFS’ source to chase a bug,) I would not dare to write my own redundant storage system. I feel like storage is a complex area with tons of hard-learned gotchas, and similar to cryptography, a best practice is to not roll your own unless truly necessary. This is not your run-of-the-mill web app and mistakes eat data. Potentially data with bite marks that gets backed up, eventually fully replacing the original before it’s caught. I don’t have data for this but I bet the proportion of Unraid users with eaten data from the total Unraid userbase is significantly higher than the equivalent for solutions using industry standard systems. The average web UI user probably isn’t browsing through their ods/xlsx files regularly to check whether some 5 became a 13.
The difference between building your own car and designing your own internal combustion engine.
Big fan of unRAID, glad the top license stays lifetime (for now anyways).
One hopes that this revenue improves development times.
All existing licenses will stay lifetime. Basic and Plus will no longer be sold, but they will still be honoured.
How does UnRAID Compare to TrueNAS Core (which is free, and backed by what seems to be a much bigger/more commercial organization)?
I used UnRAID years ago, but didn’t like booting from a USB drive - it was problematic and made me nervous.
Unraid uses a very simplistic scheme where you throw together a bunch of drives and one parity drive. The parity drive needs to be as big as the largest normal drive and holds recovery checksums for all the other.
Basically you can lose any one disk and still be able to recover the data, and the disks don’t have to be the same size.
You can achieve the same with snapraid + mergerfs if you want.
TrueNAS uses distributed parity schemes so it has same size requirements, but it also protects against bitrot and has other extra features.
Thanks for this clarification! That is slightly more palatable.
Also posted it because unraid is not moving solely to annual subscriptions as your title and others have indicated. Previous pro and other fully included lifetime subs are just increasing in price and a lower tier is coming in to place.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LTS Long Term Support software version LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
[Thread #531 for this sub, first seen 21st Feb 2024, 05:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
By the way, you can still buy the old licenses, which will be grandfathered in, and they will keep the old license upgrade paths too (Basic -> Plus -> Pro), so now may be a good time to grab a Basic license if you think you might want a lifetime Basic, Plus or Pro license in the future.
Thanks I was hoping you could
@AnActOfCreation no thank you
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