Hi there, I had come across this post https://perfectmediaserver.com/01-overview/overview and had known of the website for quite some time. But essentially, this post https://perfectmediaserver.com/01-overview/faq/#what-about-unraid-openmediavault-or-freenas is basically saying that the perfect media server is something open source. I have found a comparisment here https://perfectmediaserver.com/01-overview/faq/#what-about-unraid-openmediavault-or-freenas.

But what I dont want is that in 30 years time something happens to unraid, and it shuts down or something like that. I hope it does last until the 24th century. I know it is built atop open source, but I have heard some people say unraid is not open source? i don't know if unraid is open source and the only part that is closed source is the payment system? If unraid is not open source, it would be a great feature to have, considering it's about self-hosting and people want things to last.

Unraid is open source as far as the storage stack is concerned.

1. The UnRAID array uses a modified version of MD RAID, which has all of its corresponding sources stored right on USB that you could use to compile your own kernel with

2. Pools use Btrfs (and ZFS as of 6.12). A pool created on UnRAID is completely usable on other systems without any tinkering. XFS pools are single disk and mount like any single disk filesystem.

3. Disks inside your UnRAID array are independent formatted disks individually, with a dedicated parity disk. Nothing is striped, nor stored in any obscure, proprietary format. Even without the custom patches, all the data on disks are fully available and mountable on any standard linux distro.

 

Additionally, docker containers use standard docker which can be used on standard linux. You can quite literally take the variables you set in the UnRAID docker web UI, pass them to docker on any standard linux distro, pass in the same data/mounts, and everything works perfectly.

 

VMs are the same. They use bog standard KVM via Libvirt and QEMU, also readily available on most common distros.

 

Rest assured, you're never locked in when it comes to your data with UnRAID. The true magic of UnRAID is the web UI and ease it provides for managing and monitoring the array. For that, it's very much worth it, even with some of its shortcomings imo, it still gets the closest to what I want in a storage+compute OS for personal use 

Edited March 28, 20233 yr by JSE