Unraid SOHO - New License Tier

[dhendodong]

Now that zfs is almost out and it seems the 30 drive limit is bottlenecking its full potential and specially now that hard drives are more affordable, imho it should be increased to atleast 60 specially now that zfs is imminent we there will be a choice that we wont be relying on unraids built in parity because we have zfs now z1/z2/z3.. but i understand not everyone wants/needs beyond 30 drives and thus i propose that, there should be a new license beyond unraid pro prolly a SOHO edition which makes sense so unraid can become a REAL nas os competitor beyond unraids target market which is home users, where prolly in the long run when they outgrow unraid will likely switch to more capable nas os thus this proposal can evolve unraid and can be started to be used on small/startup business infostructures imho its the drive limit that is bottlenecking both unraid and zfs' full potential like i already said before.

[BRiT]

If I recall correctly, and I may be off the mark... The top tier allows for unlimited number of drives to be connected but has a limit of 30 devices PER POOL. So if you want to use more than 30 drives, say 60 drives then you would define 2 different POOLS.

[dhendodong]

3 minutes ago, BRiT said:

If I recall correctly, and I may be off the mark... The top tier allows for unlimited number of drives to be connected but has a limit of 30 devices PER POOL. So if you want to use more than 30 drives, say 60 drives then you would define 2 different POOLS.

 

Yes i think they have a plan to support multiple pools in the future, however in my opinion why not just combine all in a single pool to easily manage the shares and when having more than 30 drives in a single pool just disable the unraid built in parity which is what i think is preventing us to have more than 30 drives on a single pool, or only allow more than 30 drives on a single pool when zfs/btrfs etc. is the filesystem.

[itimpi]

I am not sure that having such a large number of drives in a single pool makes sense as if something goes wrong you would lose a very large amount of data.

 

What I m hoping will happen is that the User Share system will be enhanced in a multi-pool scenario so that you can use that to get a unified view across multiple pools in a more powerful way than is currently the case.  I must admit I do not know how this would work but it seems a more useful way forward. You could then still have a unified view of the whole system but structure each pool/array arround its own needs for performance and resilience.

 

In fact when I think about it I can see a new tier being introduced that is below the Pro licence once the need for the main array is removed and it simply becomes another pool type.  After all with the current existing multi-pool support it is already possible to get something of the order of 1000 drives being managed by Unraid so maybe a licence that limits the total drives in all pools put together would make more sense.

[dhendodong]

4 hours ago, itimpi said:

I am not sure that having such a large number of drives in a single pool makes sense as if something goes wrong you would lose a very large amount of data.

 

What I m hoping will happen is that the User Share system will be enhanced in a multi-pool scenario so that you can use that to get a unified view across multiple pools in a more powerful way than is currently the case.  I must admit I do not know how this would work but it seems a more useful way forward. You could then still have a unified view of the whole system but structure each pool/array arround its own needs for performance and resilience.

 

In fact when I think about it I can see a new tier being introduced that is below the Pro licence once the need for the main array is removed and it simply becomes another pool type.  After all with the current existing multi-pool support it is already possible to get something of the order of 1000 drives being managed by Unraid so maybe a licence that limits the total drives in all pools put together would make more sense.

Yeah thats why like i said, they should only allow us to bypass the said 30 drives limit per pool if we are not using unraids' default implementation of parity, only when using OPEN-ZFS' implementation eg raid z1,z2,z3 and so on, that way we have unlimited potential for drive expansion and thus unraid will be a real "NAS" competitor.

Remember NOKIA got bankrupted because they did not embraced change and stick to their comfort zone.

[itimpi]

Just now, dhendodong said:

Yeah thats why like i said, they should only allow us to bypass the said 30 drives limit per pool if we are not using unraids' default implementation of parity, only when using OPEN-ZFS' implementation eg raid z1,z2,z3 and so on, that way we have unlimited potential for drive expansion and thus unraid will be a real "NAS" competitor.

Remember NOKIA got bankrupted because they did not embraced change and stick to their comfort zone.

I personally still do not see any reason why you want you would want such large pools.  The amount of data that you could potentially lose if something goes wrong with a pool increases with the size of the pool.  This can be mitigated if you have a comprehensive backup strategy but many users only back up critical stuff regularly.

 

I also still do not see why a single unified view via the User Share system covering several pools is not a better solution than gigantic pools.

[dhendodong]

3 minutes ago, itimpi said:

I personally still do not see any reason why you want you would want such large pools.  The amount of data that you could potentially lose if something goes wrong with a pool increases with the size of the pool.  This can be mitigated if you have a comprehensive backup strategy but many users only back up critical stuff regularly.

 

I also still do not see why a single unified view via the User Share system covering several pools is not a better solution than gigantic pools.

Well even with the most capacity drives available today, say 20TB on the 30 drive limit you cant still reach a PB of storage, say you want to use it in a small business, in my opinion a single mass pool is better than simplifying User Share implementation because its easier to manage it that way because everything is on a single pool and at the same time you can maximize ZFS' full potential e.g. SnapShots, ZRAID... and so on, but that is just my opinion.  

[i-chat]

On 3/19/2023 at 1:21 PM, dhendodong said:

because its easier to manage it that way because everything is on a single pool and at the same time you can maximize ZFS' full potential e.g. SnapShots, ZRAID... and so on, 

honnestly i cant DISagree with this more. 

if you even start to think about how zfs works and what it does (and how)  you would instantly find why larger pools are often  "bad ideas TM"   on enterprise hardware with ehterprise  kind of workloads this is absolutely true,  but this WILL come at an unmeasurable cost on system resources.    try calculationg parity on (more than) 8 nodes double parity with a core i3  2, or 4, core cpu while also running a few services like plexserv, torrents, nextcloud and maybe a few others?   

 

when running zfs with 30 disks or more you are already looking at systems  outside of the scope of most desktop cpu i fear. 

at least with smaller pools you can scedule them one after another untill all of them are done. 

On 3/19/2023 at 1:21 PM, dhendodong said:

 

but that is just my opinion.  

i would really like to know what 'this opionion is based on, and how you percieved it to work... 
what in your view is the benefit ... an why / how. 

Edited April 29, 2023 by i-chat