...after a loooong awaited period of time, the FreeNAS decendant (or evolution, maybe) has finally arrived.

See OpenMediaVault.org

Interested to see what this looks like so will probably have a go with it.

It looks like a glorified NAS OS.

 

I do not have a any use for a another NAS appliance on my network at this time, I might toss it on ESXi and monkey with it.

It might also be useful as an iSCSI target if i ever need another one.

 

I will admit i do like the the interface.

It also has a few features unRAID lacks, like group membership, quota management, data use tracking.

 

I don't see enough activity/support just yet to put my production data on it.

 

thanks for the heads up, it is nice to see what else is out there..

I believe that this support community is the key to unRAID's success.  FreeNAS never caught on because of the lack of support.  I fear that OMV may take the same course, but I'm keen to see where it goes.

 

The simple fact is that people don't want to invest nearly as much time and effort into a product that they received for free or for next to nothing.  Once you buy an unRAID license you are invested in the product's success which results in an amazing turnout of volunteer efforts, such as the plethora of free tech support and the amazing plug-ins developed by unRAID community members.  For this reason, I think unRAID's pricing scheme is very intelligent.  $69-$149 is not so high as to scare people away, but also not so negligible as to allow people to abandon it without a second thought.  If a $10 piece of software stopped working for me, I wouldn't hesitate to look for alternatives.  If a $100 piece of software stopped working for me, I would definitely put a bit of effort into salvaging my investment.

 

Granted there are plenty of examples that counter the statement above, such as the success of free HTPC platforms like XBMC and Plex, and the failure (or unpopularity) of paid-for systems like WHS.  Still, I think it holds true for products at large.

I still see nothing about providing redundant data protection with mixed drive sizes? It appears you just set-up a RAID array.

 

unRAID does well due to it's simplicity. Just boot the USB drive, go to the web interface and set up the drives and user shares and then it just works. Then, if you want to do more, there are lots of capabilities you can add too. However, you can ignore the add-ons if you aren't interested - they aren't forced on you with the base install. The new plug-in structure will just make it better - simply drop the file onto the flash drive and reboot and there are new settings available on the interface for that application - yet it doesn't force anything on the basic user either.

 

I don't think anyone can say WHS is a failure. There are lots of WHS's running for storage. Now, the new version sounds like it'll be a failure with some key features removed. Now WHS with the drives protected like unRAID to gain the mix and match drive protection could be a game changer - I highly doubt Microsoft would ever do it though.

 

Which brings up an interesting point. The mix and match drive size capabilites of unRAID have only been similarily duplicated in the Drobo and to some extent in that freeware snapshot raid program. Surprizingly, no-one else seems to be releasing anything. Tom really did nail down a unique capability with unRAID.

 

Peter

 

Amahi does it also without parity protection though. Only file duplication:-)

 

Sent from my LG-P990 using Tapatalk

The main reason I use unRAID is for the mixed size drives capability.

Another reason is that there is a dedicated parity drive keeping data safe and readable on each individual drive.

 

If it wasn't for these I would consider moving to a different SW solution.