• 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

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
    259·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • Hiko0@feddit.deEnglish
      231·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
        54·
        4 months ago

        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.

        • Hiko0@feddit.deEnglish
          51·
          4 months ago

          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.

          • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
            21·
            4 months ago

            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.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
        11·
        4 months ago

        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.

    • nis@feddit.dkEnglish
      31·
      4 months ago

      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”?

      • rentar42@kbin.social
        7·
        4 months ago

        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).

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
          21·
          4 months ago

          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.

      • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
        31·
        4 months ago

        The difference between building your own car and designing your own internal combustion engine.