MrCrispy

Thank you. for those wondering why I'd do this, I'm thinking it allows me to better partition data. i.e. keep documentaries on one drive etc. I'm assuming after I do this, I can still copy to the share and it will then use its allocation strategy?

I am planning a new serve build and had a question about how to organize data on disks, since the data drives will be new or converted from NTFS, so it won't be existing layout. If I create top level folders like movies/tv on multiple drives, then copy over the data (this is after formatting them in Unraid), then start the array, will it then show up as movies/tv shares that combine all the drives? or alternatively, will this happen if I create the shares after creating folders and populating them? is the process of creating shares and picking an allocation strategy functionally equivalent to creating folders with the same name? I'm guessing the allocation strategy only comes into play when new data is copied?

those cost quite a bit more though.

Thank you. This cpu has 6 cores, 6 thread i.e no hyperthreading, does this affect vm's or how responsive it is? Will I be able to run a full Windows 11 desktop vm for general purpose use (no gaming)?

Purchased a couple of extra keys recently. I plan to build a new server, but in meantime was thinking of converting my old desktop pc. If I make an Unraid usb for use with it, later on I can move it to a new server, right? As I understand activation is tied to a specific key and a hw usb device id? If so I can then copy over the appdata etc as needed, may need to adjust paths/disk names as new server will have new parts, so not sure how that works though.

oh, I did see that, I remember them talking about some features but I guess I forgot they were specific with version numbers etc too. time to watch again

You know, I've read all about the privacy concerns, and the importance of keeping Mozilla alive as the only alternative to Chrome. I am ashamed to say that most of the time I end up using Chrome, because it syncs with my Google account, and I realized long ago that Google knows everything there is to know about me since my whole life is in gmail.

I agree that a roadmap with dates is impossible to adhere to. I don't know where you got this info but it would help if this was posted officially, maybe in a forum post here? i see nothing in there to improve the basic parity, improve speed of shfs, add checksums etc. Very disappointing. Its all zfs mostly.

nothing has changed for you. If you were not planning on upgrading in the past, you don't need to now. If you do upgrade to Pro, it will now cost $30 more than it did before, so there's only 1 upgrade path.

sorry, didn't know this was already done!

Didnt know this, that is great news !!

It would be quite trivial for Unraid to backup your usb and relevant server data to cloud storage. With compression it would take up pretty much no space and very little costs. Or they could just add a backup to GoogleDrive/Dropbox etc, you know like hundreds of totally free apps? so you then just insert a new usb with Unraid image, sign in, restore from backup. All of this is pretty basic stuff. Like I said tons of free apps done by single devs do this. Why can't a aid software with so many users do it?

people forget that TrueNas/Proxmox are actual enteprise products - that comes with exponentially better testing, reliability and responsiveness. Unraid is a a niche product, without community contributions it would be far worse. I don't really like how the response has been 'its worth it' to anyone who had questions about the pricing change. I don't like that there's no starter lifetime. Those small users who only have a few disks and wanted to use Unraid for its simplicity, what do they do now - pay $250, pay $36 for years and then realize its too costly and pay $250, or not get any security updates after maybe 1 year of minor version updates and risk their system? I get it, LT needed to make more money. Having a lower cost lifetime tier for those users wouldn't have hurt anyone or cannibalized sales.

you should ask for trial extension, although I don't know if it still works? btw I agree that a lot of this could've been handled better.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I would like much better parity and disk features - parity snapshots - integrated cheksums - bitrot detection and prevention - faster speeds for the array - a real cache drive - faster SMB implementation that isn't impacted by shfs

I was hoping the change would take place AFTER 12am Mar 27 US time. Is LimeTech NZ based? thats news to me.

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.

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.

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?

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.