Coolamasta

Its an awesome design, the fact you can grow your storage capacity on the fly is excellent along with the really helpful community. Only thing I would like to see is better I/O speeds, maybe some sort of tiering system like high end SAN's have, an SSD Tier, a SAS and/or SATA Tier, each tier has its own cache drives and then data can be moved between Tiers, far fetched and prob not possible but food for thought 😎

Thanks for the replies some good info, although some slightly sarcastic 😏 I never said I was unwilling to buy a license, I was not fishing for discount it was a genuine question if there are ever sales on licences same as what Plex do for Plexpass sometimes. I just want to know I am getting value for money with the features it can offer me. I cannot afford to spend out on a bunch of 8 or 10tb drives which is why I mentioned tight budget and will have to start with a minimum of 2 I know so I have one for parity and then when I have spare cash and see sales on the big drives then slowly get more, whole reason I really like unRAID is the add single drive feature. Thanks for the info on Turbo Write I will install that on my test rig and see what I get. With my current Raid set up I constantly saturate a gigabit and have done flawlessly for years so I really want to keep that speed and I have a spare LSI HBA 6G SAS card (can't remember model bit it's non-raid) for which will be perfect.

Hi all, I have been looking at larger NAS solutions for my media storage mainly Video, Pictures & Music, I have been using Windows Server with a LSI Raid controller with 8 x 3tb WD Red's in Raid-5 for last few years but out of space now and can't add any more drives to the controller I am using so going to look at slowly buying (tight budget) in 8 & 10tb Red's or most prob shucking Externals. I really don't want to be Raid-5'ing such large capacity drives and can't easily just add one to a R5 array so after reading quite a lot online I have got it down to going for either a FreeNAS or unRAID NAS but just can't decide as pros/cons are different for each. I prob wont be using a lot of the advance unRAID features as just mainly want a low power NAS box, the main reason I really like it is the fact you can just add single drives to grow it but then the write speeds have put me off (I know a cache disk can be used) but I need to be able to transfer saturating a gigabit link as I do read/write large amounts of data around often. I have had a play with a trial key of unRAID and like what I have seen but its awfully hard to justify the cost for the I/O speeds being seen, is there anything that can be done to it to properly saturate a gigabit link when writing to disk? Its the cost that has me on the fence, if unRAID were free or a fair bit less then I would be going for it but I can make FreeNAS do what I want and its free even though I cant add single disks which is what I really like with unRAID, hmmm just not sure what route to go, what other advantages does unRAID have worth noting and is there ever any sales on the unRAID licences? Cheers 🙂