- 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: archive.ph/YCFoR
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 8 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.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
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.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
“Now announcing UnRAID 2, UnRAID original will no longer receive updates as we focus our resources on UnRAID 2.”
And “UnRAID 2” will only have a subscription model, and people will the OG lifetime license won’t be grandfathered into the new license.
Like Adobe and Photoshop.
I’d say it’ll happen before 2030.
But I may just be cynical at this point.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Yeah, I’ve read about that and I couldn’t buy it because you could achieve similar results with LVM, ZFS etc. 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. 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 use 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.
Hiko0@feddit.de 8 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.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 8 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 multiplied by 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.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
TrueNAS is a better option for purely a NAS
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Than Unraid or DIY?
whodatdair@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I do like dancing bears…