MrCrispy

Members
  • Posts

    179
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by MrCrispy

  1. 2 hours ago, Danny N said:

    if Btrfs did what it said it would do reliablely zfs would never have been made or even if it was gain much market share, it’s only because btrfs was (and still is) not amazingly reliable (a must for a file system) in anything but its most simple modes (stripe and mirror) and there being a market demand for something btrfs like that zfs was developed

    Its the other way around, ZFS predates btrfs by quite a bit. if anything btrfs is inspired by ZFS, and it only happened because reiserfs was dead. 

  2. 1 hour ago, Danny N said:

    truenas and promox will not priories features home users want while unraid will,

     

    Are they? The vast majority of improvements and new features come from the community. The core product's parity, cache/move are essentially unchanged since inception. Meanwhile we see huge amount of dev effort being spent on ZFS which from the discussion in this thread, everyone seems to agree is not for home users.

     

    If you look at the issues Unraid users had a long time ago - slow write speeds, slow smb, lack of any additional disk features like dedupe, checksums, snapshots, all of them exist today in the exact same way. We've seen improvements to docker etc and now you can have more cache pools and a higher limit, but thats about it isn't it?

  3. 1 hour ago, Spec7re said:

    Regardless which array type, file system, etc... you use (ie: ZFS, btrfs, Unraid), one should still have proper backups of their important data. Sure you can read the drives outside of the array, but if the drive that died had all your family photos, but the one that survived had you Linux iso's 😉, I'm sure you'd be very upset. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to argue against the Unraid type pool, I'm just saying that people shouldn't get caught up in the nitty gritty of each solution and instead focus on always having a proper backup strategy.

     

    of course backups are important, but we can't backup all data, hence why RAID/parity exists. 

     

    the problem is this - with both ZFS/Unraid, if a data disk dies, you can try and restore it. This involved an array rebuild.

     

    With a striped storage like RAID/ZFS, if there are ANY problems during the rebuild, guess what, your ENTIRE array/zpool is gone. This is a well known problem. 

     

    With Unraid, even if there's an issue, you will ONLY lose that disk. And even in that case, using disk recovery software, its very likely you can recover some files.

     

    At the end of the day, I do not think any striped data set is safe for home use.

    • Like 1
    • Upvote 1
  4. 1 hour ago, Spec7re said:

    It is indeed true, but from my understanding (I think they addressed it in the Unraid podcast as well) is that while btrfs is great it's still limited in some aspects compared to ZFS. It cannot go beyond mirrors reliably which has been a sore spot for btrfs.  From what I recall (unless it has changed recently) btrfs has issues doing things like raid 5, raid 6, etc... something that certain individuals may want and something ZFS does exceptionally well.

     

    As I've said I do think ZFS is overkill for the vast majority of home users, but there are indeed use cases for it and certain individuals will see the benefit from it (ie: a freelance Videographer, doing edits off the server). I still stand by my question, as I suspect that it will come up...not because I necessarily agree with it, but it will come up for discussion at some point. Regardless which array type, file system, etc... you use (ie: ZFS, btrfs, Unraid), one should still have proper backups of their important data. Sure you can read the drives outside of the array, but if the drive that died had all your family photos, but the one that survived had you Linux iso's 😉, I'm sure you'd be very upset. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to argue against the Unraid type pool, I'm just saying that people shouldn't get caught up in the nitty gritty of each solution and instead focus on always having a proper backup strategy.

     

    All in all, it's just about choice. Lime Tech isn't taking away the ability to keep using the "Unraid" array, it's just offering another solution to those that want it. It also opens the door for Unraid to be used in certain situations outside of the home (ie: a small business type situation)...at least that's how I see it.

     

    I agree there's a use case for ZFS. That use caae is e.g like you said, high speed storage for video editing. And its no coincidence that this is exactly the use case for the big youtube channels who have terabytes of new video, massive builds, and promote Unraid. I believe when LTT did their first Unraid video it was a huge boost in sales. 

     

    This use case is diametrically opposite to what home users need. And ironically, a real enterprise would also never use Unraid because its inherently insecure, they have no use for things like community apps, and they have a hundred other options to run ZFS or even better file systems like ceph etc.

     

    So Unraid's biggest promoters on social media, with a very niche set of demands that are irrelevant to the majority of the userbase, end up driving the feature set, because they directly influence sales, much more than you or me. 

     

    And the other undeniable fact is LT is a smalll company with very limited resources. Its fine to say that 'it isn't taking away the ability' but it IS taking away developer time and resources which is far more important. There are a ton of features that can and should be improved before ZFS.

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
  5. 10 hours ago, Spec7re said:

    I think there was a vote on this forum from Lime Tech (a while a go) asking the community what major feature they wanted them work on next and I believe ZFS won, hence them implementing it.

     

    Personally I think it's overkill for home users, but it does opens the door for Unraid to be used in other situations. Unraid's default array is easy to expand (good for home users), but it's not the fastest. ZFS has a ton of features, but I think for a lot of people, it's more about the increased performance than anything else. I've read quite a few posts over various forums/Reddit threads, etc... of individuals who love Unraid, but wanted to use it for something like video editing, but couldn't due to the limited performance of Unraid. ZFS now opens the door for this group of people and others with similar use cases to use Unraid.

     

    Either way Lime Tech isn't removing the default Unraid array, it will still be available for those that want it, but ZFS gives users another option to choose from if it's something they need. Really it's about opening the doors for Unraid to be used is more situations, other than just your typically media server.

    Ironically, ZFS has been working on giving ZFS users the ability to expand the pool/vdev one drive at a time (similar to Unraid) and is due to come out later this year from what I remember. So in a way, you can say that Unraid has (in a way) inspired home users who prefer ZFS to push and ask for this ability in ZFS as well...which is being done. So I guess the next big question is, once ZFS has that ability, does it make Unraid's default array obsolete in a way, especially when you consider the increased performance, etc...?? I don't know the answer to that, but I am sure this question will come up at some point.

     

    btrfs does everything ZFS does, mostly, in a much more friendly and less resource intensive way, with added features, and more modern. I see no reason to adopt ZFS except being a bigger name and more enterprisy.

     

    about your last point - it doesn't matter if ZFS can expand. btrfs does this already. Both of them stripe data. With unraid i know that I can simply take any drive and it will have all its files in native format, readable outside the array.

    • Upvote 1
  6. 3 hours ago, xokia said:

    Might help if they implemented an actual cache drive.

     

    For unraid with the new pricing structure folks are going to expect features JMO. Which to date they have been fairly slow at rolling out. Maybe that improves, but if they think it will business as usual I think they are in for a rude awakening. There are going to be the die hard fans that unraid can do no wrong. But if we are actually honest with ourselves new pricing is going to cause a serious eval of whether a home user thinks the features provided justify the added cost. It would be a no for me. And nothing against unraid its fairly decent software. The fragility of parity and no real cache drive support are concerns in my book that would have me weighing other options.

     

    the question is what features? from all the blog posts and what was said in the interview, as well as the last few releases, their main focus seems to be ZFS. Which to me goes completely against home users. But it attracts the enterprise guys - those who do this at work and want the same systems at home, and they also have the $$$.

     

    LT have also said they won't publish a roadmap. And the general feeling among most users seems to be that its perfect as it is, there isn't much traction when lack of features/speed is discussed. e.g improving parity.

     

    I would like much more transparency from the official devs about what we can expect.

    • Thanks 1
  7. 3 minutes ago, HardwareHarry said:

    In my understanding that is not what the sytem is designed for. Just use an old PC and throw in the disks you have. ANd there are not thousands of high end youtuber buying unraid- (most of then are not even high end ;-) ) They could also use OMV or Truenas or Proxmox  with different systems etc. 

    I don't see that new customer base for unraid. 

     

    First rule of the fight club sales: Know your customer base

    at the end of they day they are a business. I'm sure they have internal numbers and did the math for projected sales and growth.

     

    one thing I did notice on reddit and other forums is they must've had a lot of sales in the last month as people scramble to get the legacy prices.

     

    The prices have basically doubled. my thought is they are hoping a lot of users who choose the new starter/unleashed options, after using for a few years, will be tempted to upgrade to lifetime. you could end up paying a lot more than 250 too.

     

    I'm not here to debate what the ideal price is. I feel like this will almost certainly exclude the lower end of the segment. Whenever someone recommends unraid, it will always be followed by 'but you should really pay for lifetime, its worth it'. another option is you but the cheaper one, and after a year you just keep using it and forget about upgrades. Even that leaves a bad taste as there will be very limited security updates.

  8. 1 minute ago, HardwareHarry said:

     

    I also hope that never happens, but given the structure of the members of e.g. this Community in the forum I somehow doubt there will be many new users and I somehow doubt many of the current user would actually have choose this system as new users (including myself and a buddy of mine to whom I recommended Unraid (and who has 2 Plus licenses now).)  When I was thinking about it my limit was something about the psychological "199 USD "  limit and even that would be hard to swallow for me. But 250USD = ~230Eur. ....would not be an option for me. For my server and backup server thats 500 USD !!!

     

    I agree with you. the price is a little too high. Unfortunately a lot of users here are long time users with massive servers, so are the youtubers, so for this segment even costing $500 would probably not be a problem as their disks/hw cost multipe thousands. And that is the most vocal segment of the community.

     

    I wonder if LT have decided to target the higher end of the market as there's more money there?

  9. 17 minutes ago, HardwareHarry said:

    My suspicion would be that this leads to the rise of OMV and Truenas and Unraid might beginn to struggle in 2-4 years but who am I to say

     

    I certainly hope that never happens (I mean LT struggling part), in fact I hope it means they can grow and innovate more!

    I am also worried the future may bring more licensing changes. And it does exclude the beginner user who doesn't have much money.

  10. 3 hours ago, enJOyIT said:

     

    If all your array drives where nvme/ssd drives you would have a lot more writing speed because the slow down are coming from the HDD read heads. And they are moving all around to get the bits for calculating the new parity bits. But it's highly not recommended because of missing trim support.

     

    So the answer is: It's a physical problem which limetech never can fix for HDD drives.

     

    but this is not true. even standard SATA has much higher write speeds. There are posts here where people have done plenty of tests and the conclusion was the smb and FUSE in unraid was to blame, without that they got much higher speeds, without using any cache.

  11. 7 hours ago, Spec7re said:

    I don't think Unraid is widely used in the commercial space. First and foremost it has been designed and built to target the home market from it's inception.

     

    Unraid first and foremost is a NAS and for business/enterprise customers, they want very fast, robust, tried and true solutions.

     

    you just made 2 completely contradictory statements. So do you think its designed for home or for business users? I think your 2nd sentence, you meant home?

     

    The speed issue is a real problem, I don't know how much of that is due to FUSE or due to Unraid's implementation. Looking at other FUSE implementations and tests, it seems to be the latter. I have asked about it, but no technical responses. A cache pool is just mitigating, not looking at the source of the problem.

     

    Maybe some small mom and pop shops use Unraid. A business wouldn't. They don't need the additional features for vm's, dockers, CA etc. The primary use case is as a file server. For this the main benefit Unraid has is mix and match existing disks, which is not a concern for them.

     

    • Like 1
  12. 2 hours ago, IonelChila said:

    I'm concerned that they will create two user classes, eventually segregating them with different features and capabilities. I'm willing to bet that the older license holders will eventually be required to switch to subscriptions for additional features. I've experienced this before and don't want to go through it again.

     

    this is precisely what I am concerned about. Hence why I suggested that existing Pro users should be upgraded to Lifetime and not further distinctions made. If an old legacy basic/plus upgrades later to Pro, they should also be converted to Lifetime.

     

    The reasons given for not doing this are for accounting/metrics, that may be true but it doesn't sit well with me. 

  13. 2 hours ago, Saulimedes said:

    it's disheartening to acknowledge that alternatives like Proxmox and OpenMediaVault exist

    just a small quibblle - I honestly don't understand the love for Proxmox. It doesn't even have docker support, you are supposed to run a Linux vm instance for those. All it does is vm's, zfs/storage pools etc. Is running multiple vm's that popular? isn't that exactly what docker does, much more efficiently, for most cases where you needed a vm before. And if you do need vm's, whats wrong with qemu+kvm. Proxmox just adds a hypervisor for added complexity that IMO is completely pointless for home users.

     

    Also like I said before none of these do disk pooling with native data format. I think people don't realize unaware most people are, they look at competing RAID solutions and think its the same thing.

  14. 42 minutes ago, xokia said:

    Maybe with the new pricing model they can afford to implement a real cache drive? Maybe some ECC protection on parity so it doesn't dump the parity drive on error? Currently failures tend to be catastrophic to parity which weakens the value of the feature JMO.

     

    Any improvements to the core system will be welcome. Unfortunately I don't think there have been any? all the new stuff is about dockers/vm/themes? I posted before about my thoughts on this, using snapraid etc, but have not gotten any official replies, everything Ive seen is only about ZFS

  15. For people with massive servers, the $250 price is just 1 more hdd out of the 20 they have, so its no big deal.

    for casual users, its the choice between adding a 20TB hdd or not. Remember if they use Unraid they also need another hdd of same size for parity.

     

    In the real world a lot of people don't use backups or parity, this is not a good thing of course but its the reality. This is where the new price will hurt.

  16. 15 hours ago, guybrush2012 said:

     

    You can't compare Microsoft with Limetech.

     

    This is about NAS software and there are good and free alternatives.

    Examples: If you have a Ugreen NAS, then you have UgreenOS or you install TrueNAS Scale + TrueCharts, Proxmox, OpenMediavault, Xpenology.

     

    You can also install CASAOS on UgreenOS (debian). Then you have a nice community-based open source GUI.

    The same is with the OpenMediaVault + CASAOS. Portainers are also available.

     

    Have you looked at alternative software?

     

    TrueNAS and Proxmox have been around for a very long time. You should find out how you make money.

    Instead of buying software for $249, people prefer to buy hardware.


    Why should you spend so much money on NAS software when the others are just as good?

    Limetech is doing itself no favors. This could also be the beginning of the end.

     

    Screenshot 2024-03-24 151515.png

    Screenshot 2024-03-24 151544.png

    Screenshot 2024-03-24 151611.png

     

    I think the value proposition of Unraid is not being communicated to users and is getting lost.

     

    Unraid is primarily about the array - i.e. shfs using software real time parity, mix/match disk sizes, and NOT striping data.

    TrueNas or any of the custom NAS OS's don't do this.

    THIS is what keeps your data safe and allows you to grow.

     

    You can use mergerfs to combine disks. But the only alternative for parity is snapraid and its not real time.

     

    Everything else - vm's, dockers, community apps. all of that came much later, all of it its just a wrapper around open source projects you can use on any other distro or custom OS, with maybe a little bit more work.

     

    No one else has the data safefy. Not if you want to avoid striping and keep data in native format.

    • Like 3
  17. 16 hours ago, LSG501 said:

    That is quite a substantial jump in price... it's basically doubled in a best case scenario and for all intense purposes it makes, imo, no real financial sense to buy anything but the lifetime license if you intend to use a server for more than 5 years....pretty common for a home server I would have thought..... which kind of makes me think you should have just increased all the prices instead of going down the yearly payment approach on lower tiers.

     

    I wasn't sure about the changes being a good idea before but I'm even more sure it's not a great proposition compared with other options now - I would not pick unraid at these new prices, so I'm lucky to be grandfathered in.  I will likely jump on another copy now for a second server, bet I won't be the only one doing that or grabbing the upgrade now - so part of the 'quick influx of cash' before the change which might end up bringing in less long term.  I hope I'm wrong because the long term health of unraid is dependent on enticing new users but hmm....

     

    Don't like the bit about security updates being the active minor release, and only for 1 minor release (it stops at x.x.0 of the second minor release), not to mention there's no mention of 'bug fixes' that may need a whole new minor release to fully fix them either... no actual timeline for release updates means a minor release could be months or years etc as well, I'd rather have a defined amount of time here, bit like android updates.

     

    I also thought we were supposed to be getting an email about this change as a heads up, I haven't had one....

     

    I still think this is fundamentally a subscription model on the lower tiers, it's not a subscription for the software, it's a subscription to stay bug free and secure and I HATE subscriptions and things that act the same way.  You can disagree or try and say otherwise but it won't change my opinion on this now I've see all the info that's been put out. 

     

    I agree with this, but also the industry seems to be moving in this direction (i.e. subscriptions) and in general anti consumer practices. e.g rentals for movies, not owning anything, devices that can't be repaired, digital content you purchased for 'lifetime' that just disappears or stops working.

     

    I read that big companies like Plex are going to discontinue lifetime licenses because its not a good business model. And I'm sure Plex makes quite a bit of money.

     

    I'm going to say something that is obviously not the direction LimeTech wants, so please don't take it that I am advocating or asking for this: in my ideal scenario, Unraid goes full open source! Along with that comes massive influx of developers and much faster pace of development (as we've seen, the community is probably a massive part of it already). LT makes money by offering support, value add features, premium addons, partners with hardware oem's. As well as offer other products, integrations that other businesses will pay for etc. I'm not a bizdev person, all this may be unfeasible.

     

    I wonder how many people will pay for lifetime vs the annual fees? or how often updates will be needed? I think LT giving all these options and looking out for current users is so admirable, I do wish there was a clear revenue stream that also allows people who can't afford the new prices to use it.

  18. If speed is a priority and you want data striping, IMHO Unraid is not the product for you. There are any number of free and commercial RAID based solutions that can accomplish this.

     

    As to why Limetech is spending money on ZFS while seemingly completely ignoring Snapraid like functionality, I believe the answer is what I said earlier - ZFS is a very big name and can bring in popularity and $$$, and many of the big Unraid adopters and popularizers are people with $$$ and giant servers, youtube channels, who can afford it. ZFS makes almost no sense for the typical home Unraid user, vs the ones with giant server racks and multiple servers and enterprise gear.

     

     

  19. On 3/18/2024 at 8:11 PM, manofoz said:

    The DIY JBOD's I've read about look to use a cheap motherboard to plug in an SAS expander so my guess would be powering on via a switch wired to the motherboard. I was thinking about going that route instead of getting one of these but I went with the 36 bay chassis. Since unRAID's array doesn't go over 30 drives I'm not sure I'd go the route of attaching more disks vs. making a standalone NAS if I needed more than that. I'm using 20TB drives so 28 wouldn't be bad assuming the 2 parity drives count against the 30. 

    Yes, I believe its the cse-ptjbod-cb2 motherboard. My qn was more about how to turn the DAS on/off along with the main server, and does it go to sleep? 

    So you will have close to 600TB of storage? that is one hell of a server!

  20. 1 hour ago, Jaybau said:

    The problem with BTRFS is the RAID 5/6 bug where you can lose the entire pool.  This isn't something I'm willing to risk.

     

    I am curious why SnapRAID isn't added to NerdTools and plugged into Unraid.  It can be very simple to do. But, I also could be completely wrong, and would like to know why.  There might be scenarios I haven't considered.  It might be a lot more difficult to manage than I think.

     

    I'll be experimenting with ZFS to find out how resource hungry it is.  So now I am very curious.  It's not like I'm running Unraid on a Raspberry Pi or minipc.  I have 3 spare 1TB drives to learn with.  I assume my home network will be the speed bottleneck.

     

     

    I believe ZFS ideally needs a lot of RAM. As well as higher resource requirements in general.

     

    ZFS will use half of RAM as cache and upto 90% if needed.  A quote from another forum - "ZFS is memory hungry, more than other file systems. Given the way it writes data to disk (non-linear, log-structured), it tends to have a large amount of metadata in memory, and make heavy use of that metadata. If that metadata gets corrupted in memory, bad things will happen. An even more important argument is the following: ZFS always reads and writes CRCs, so the data on disk and on the way to/from the disk is safe against corruption. That means that data in memory is now the largest target for corruption. While this doesn't mean that ECC is more necessary than for other filesystems (which also fill all unused memory with cache data), for ZFS the relative importance of memory errors is higher"

     

    SnapRaid as an external tool would not make any use of unRaid. The shfs code already has every write/read to the array go thru it. It doesn't make sense to have to run an external tool like snapRaid sync to read data and check parity, when that is already being done inside unraid. What could be added is checksums, as well as other functionality, in the same driver in Unraid that computes and checks parity. Then its a simple matter of using snapraid's other tools and utils. 

     

    Unless we hear from the official team, this isn't going to go anywhere. Sadly I don't think anyone else cares about this, all the hype is about ZFS, and its far easier to sell ZFS as a new feature. There is a big inertia in the Unraid community, the few threads I've read on this all basically amount to 'i'm happy with what I have and we shouldn't demand more'. The file integrity plugin is already deprecated I believe and in any case would not prevent against bitrot.

     

     

    • Like 1
  21. 2 hours ago, Jaybau said:

     

    I think these are being accomplished by extending Unraid with File Integrity plugin and backup software.  This basically becomes scrubs, snapshots, backup. 

     

    I think what is really being requested is for an integrated, seamless, easy solution.  And to do this without the need of doubling the drives with backups/mirror/replication; accomplish via parity algorithm.  I prefer the storage/redundancy/restoration/protection efficiency of parity versus 1:1 backup/mirror (50% efficiency).  What I don't understand is why Unraid doesn't think this concept would be an evolutionary step.  It doesn't seem like the solution is that far away or costly, so I don't understand why its not being developed.

     

    I am looking for a seamless suite of tools to EASILY manage scrubs and restoration.  If SnapRAID+Unraid was offered, I would probably go that route (all the benefits of Unraid+what I want from ZFS/BTRFS without the disadvantages).  Since SnapRAID is not offered, I am preparing for ZFS.  My hope is that once I get ZFS configured, scrubs and repairs are just a matter of clicking a button.  The price I pay for ZFS is worth not having the cost of a headache with data integrity problems, panics, time, restoring from a backup.

     

    I don't think ZFS is ideal, but it is offering the next step towards what I want, until something else better is offered.  Maybe someone will create a SnapRAID plugin.  Maybe Unraid will develop the next generation of Unraid parity. 

     

    In the meantime, I'm going to spend more money on buying more drives to get the solution I want.

    I agree with you. Alas it seems ZFS has a very large mind share and is considered some kind of uber-solution, which I don't agree with at all. Its resource hungry, enterprise focused, and brings nothing to the table as far as I can tell vs btrfs, except a better name.

     

    And of course, ZFS/btrfs and any other form of striping is a complete non starter for a home solution, which is why unRaid exists in the first place.

     

    Is it really too much to ask to integrate snapRaid style checksumming/integrity checks into shfs? It would bring a huge host of benefits to everyone. Those who want to run enterprise style pools with ZFS and spend $$$$ on memory, drives etc, are welcome. But honestly, why not run TrueNas or plain old Linux if thats what you want, since the only thing lacking would be the docker integration and the CA app store, which honestly can be added manually quite easily.