this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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  • 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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (20 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The draw to me was always that you could do a RAID without needing every disk to be the same size. Parity drives just had to be the size of the largest disk in the array.

I had been thinking about buying a license previously, when it was still "lifetime." Now I'm skeptical and probably won't although good for the people who got grandfathered in to free updates, though. However, I would question how long that lasts before they're un-grandfathered-in and have to start paying for updates like everyone else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah, I've read about that but I couldn't buy it because you could achieve similar results with LVM, ZFS etc. albeit with a bit more thought. For example I used to have a mirror (RAID1) comprised of 1TB, 3TB, 4TB and an 8TB disks. The 1, 3 and 4TB disks were concatenated in an 8TB linear volume (JBOD) and then that was mirrored with the 8TB disk (RAID1). All using standard battle tested software - LVM, mdraid and Ext4. I got 8TB usable from it. I'd have gotten the same in Unraid. The redundancy was equivalent too. With ZFS things are even simpler. Build whatever redundant scheme you have disks for. Use whatever redundancy scheme makes sense for those disks. You could combine multiple schemes. E.g. 1TB + 1TB mirror and a RAIDz1 with 3x 3TB disks, all adding to 7TB of nice contiguous usable space with all the data integrity guarantees of ZFS. Heck if you need to do some 3-disks-in-a-trenchcoat trickery to utilize your obsolete hardware like I did, you can use LVM for that and give it to ZFS to use. When you're ready to expand, buy disks for whatever redundancy scheme you like and just add it to your ZFS pool. No fuss. You like living dangerously? Add disks without redundancy. Can't afford redundancy now but you'd like it later? Add disks without redundancy now, add redundancy later.

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