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] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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"?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

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