New Unraid OS License Pricing, Timeline, and FAQs

[Danny N]

10 hours ago, MrCrispy said:

 

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.

Ngl if Btrfs did what it said it would do reliablely zfs would never have been made or even if it was gain much market share, it’s only because btrfs was (and still is) not amazingly reliable (a must for a file system) in anything but its most simple modes (stripe and mirror) and there being a market demand for something btrfs like that zfs was developed and took over the enterprise section of what btrfs promised sadly nearly many the features of btrfs that appealed to home nas uses haven’t made it into zfs yet (eg. inequal drive sizes)

 

at this point I think zfs has gained so much traction that even if btrfs became exactly what was promised and stability the same as zfs it wouldn’t see much adoption outside home uses and so the project is doomed to fade into obscurity hopefully one day another fs will take the promise of btrfs and combine this with things enterprise needs like for example much better ssd management and that will gain wider adoption but without enterprise on board there’s much lower funding and dev work committed 

[Danny N]

20 hours ago, isvein said:

Agree, its confusing how it is written now.

Also, its great to have options.
Its a good thing that we both have the unraid-array, btrfs, xfs and zfs options.
And without the array, unraid would not be unraid, just another TrueNAS "clone" that would sit between core and scale.

As I try to tell all the TrueNAS "sellers" out there, TrueNAS is great, but me and many does not like or want that we are locked to zfs.
And surprise surprise, the hard hitting TrueNAS "sellers" wont mention up front that its locked to zfs, basically need identical drives, cant (for now) expand an pool without putting in same amount as drives as existing vdev(s), cant use mixed size drives (unless you make multiply pools).

And if you try to point this out they most of the time just goes "Buuut muuuh freee!!"

(also TrueNAS is not truly free, they too have developers they need to pay just like Lime, but since TrueNAS is an (as far as I know) hard hitter in the enterprise market. they also sell their own hardware solutions, there is where they get the money from. If Unraid had been a hard hitter in enterprise marked, Lime had sold their own hardware solutions etc, Im pretty sure Unraid would have been free for private use too.)

Another huge thing against truenas is a few of the more home features are not the greatest, I’ve been unable to get spin down disks to work for just 1 drive (which is dumb as you need the array to be active to get data so one 1 drive constantly spinning up and down is dumb, this is exactly why I’m gonna move this over to unraid when full zfs support is added in 6.13).

 

for those that might try to help, firstly ty but I’ve looked into it a lot and have had the unraid licence for this since last year so it’s no cost now, smart was disabled and I’ve rebuilt and reinstalled a few times now and it’s always the first drive added to the pool it also totally dumb as the drive spins up then immediately after spin up shuts down, then spins up a couple seconds later then spin down, the spin down delay in 6s so shouldn’t be doing that at all, it’ll do this for 10 mins and stop, I only use the array for in progress projects and the drives aren’t nas drives (they are my backup drives from pre unraid) so I’m not too fussed if it dies I’ll probably just rebuild the array with 1 less drive tbh 

[Danny N]

On 3/22/2024 at 12:16 PM, itimpi said:

The one thing that surprised me was that the one year extension cost was the same regardless of whether you had the Starter or Unleashed licences since they are very different first year prices.   I would have thought something more like $29 and $39 might have been considered.   Probably a good reason why not but I wondered what it was?

Ngl I thought the same but it occurred to me that this would stop people with 5 disks from buying unleashed as the cost per year goes up even if they aren’t using the only feature they paid extra for, to me it makes a lot of sence even if it really hammers people who only have 1 or 2 drives, I get why but I would worry this makes those really small use cases quite hard to justify now, I would love to see a starter lifetime one as I’ve honestly used unraid in places just to add a remote ui to some docker container or vm and so had minimal need for drives, ofc under the new licensing this is totally unworkable use case now, as cost per year is just too high for the benefit and lifetime is just dumb is crazy money for it, reallly feel limetech missed on not having some substantial discount for renuing keys on the same account 

[Danny N]

On 3/24/2024 at 9:56 AM, Helmonder said:

That is a true word….

However unraid has not been “free” for some time. Alternatives like truenasnor proxmox are there and are free. So there is absolutely a place for users who want a free option.

Unraid already is not that place.


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I’ll just say here, that unraid is built for the home user, you are the customer, for truenas / proxmox, the home version is really just the trial for the enterprise version to allow people to refine their skills in the software to where when it comes to a project at work someone will be like ik this software already lets use that, and also it increases the pool of people who can be easily recruited to manage this systems as people trained themselfs for free at home, truenas and promox will not priories features home users want while unraid will, after all there’s a really good saying that if your not the customer your the product and while it’s certainly not as bad as online ads stealing all your data your still the product being used to give truenas / proxmox free training and maybe bug testing as they probably do release less tested builds to the free users to let issues not affect their real customers 

[Helmonder]

46 minutes ago, Danny N said:

I’ll just say here, that unraid is built for the home user, you are the customer, for truenas / proxmox, the home version is really just the trial for the enterprise version to allow people to refine their skills in the software to where when it comes to a project at work someone will be like ik this software already lets use that, and also it increases the pool of people who can be easily recruited to manage this systems as people trained themselfs for free at home, truenas and promox will not priories features home users want while unraid will, after all there’s a really good saying that if your not the customer your the product and while it’s certainly not as bad as online ads stealing all your data your still the product being used to give truenas / proxmox free training and maybe bug testing as they probably do release less tested builds to the free users to let issues not affect their real customers 

 

So its a better option then truenas/proxmos and therefor paying is even more acceptable, completely agree !

[MrCrispy]

1 hour ago, Danny N said:

truenas and promox will not priories features home users want while unraid will,

 

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?

[MrCrispy]

2 hours ago, Danny N said:

if Btrfs did what it said it would do reliablely zfs would never have been made or even if it was gain much market share, it’s only because btrfs was (and still is) not amazingly reliable (a must for a file system) in anything but its most simple modes (stripe and mirror) and there being a market demand for something btrfs like that zfs was developed

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. 

[guybrush2012]

@Danny N

What false statements have I read here about TrueNAS/Proxmox?
 

1. Reliability: If your USB stick fails during Unraid, your server is gone. With TrueNAS, all SSDs/HDDs/NVMEs have to be broken at the same time. Because TrueNAS writes itself into every device. That's what you do in the enterprising sector if you value reliability.

 

2. TrueNAS or Proxox products are not well tested? Whenever I reported a BUG to the Proxmox developers, it was fixed within a few hours. With Unraid there are bugs that won't be fixed for years. Look at MACVLAN/BR0, USB passthrough, Realtek 2.5Gbit power saving mode.
 

It's better if I don't start talking about the advantages and disadvantages of Unraid/TrueNAS/Proxmox.

 

Everyone here says it's a great subscription model, but nobody changes their Basic or Plus for Starter or Unleashed.

Instead of talking, the license changes and supports Limetech.

[JorgeB]

5 minutes ago, guybrush2012 said:

With TrueNAS, all SSDs/HDDs/NVMEs have to be broken at the same time. Because TrueNAS writes itself into every device.

This is not correct, the OS boots from a separate device, though you can use a redundant mirror.

[HOLISTICAGENT]

1 day left of trial, no answers how to handle licensing for trial users that installd before new price range, so I have to look at other options, in the process of moving all the data over to an external drive.

 

Wish the community the best of luck. I cant take a chance with important information. 

 

 

[MrCrispy]

10 minutes ago, HOLISTICAGENT said:

1 day left of trial, no answers how to handle licensing for trial users that installd before new price range, so I have to look at other options, in the process of moving all the data over to an external drive.

 

Wish the community the best of luck. I cant take a chance with important information. 

 

 

 

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.

[Spec7re]

3 hours ago, Danny N said:

So as far as my understanding goes there’s many key differences between unraids array expansion method and zfs’s

1. Storage efficacy. Let’s say we have 4 identical drives in a raidz1 or in unraid 1 parity, 3 drives are data and 1 parity so 75% of your space is usable, adding one more data drive you would think increases this to 80% (4 data and 1 parity) but on zfs your locked into the 3 bits of data for every 1 bit of parity thing so it remains at 75% efficient unless you compleatly rebuild 

2. Drive failure. On zfs if you lose more drives than you have redundancy for you lose all the data on unraid you only lose the data on the failed drives as each drive is it’s own file system.

One last thing I would like to mention is that zfs’s bitrot protection only works in a raidz or mirrored array and not on a single disk which while I get why this is the case is really dumb as there’s gonna be a lot of people using zfs for a protection they don’t achally have, sadly zfs is a enterprise first fs so home uses is much lower priority 

Oh don't get me wrong, I fully understand the differences between ZFS and Unraid. My point really is just to highlight that no matter which solution/file system you use, there are pros and cons to everything. As I've said before, Unraid fits the bill for most home users, but there are situations where something like ZFS is better. There is no perfect solution and either option will have it's compromises. At the end of the day, it comes down to the user and what they feel is best for them.

 

Regardless which solution someone uses, backups of your important/irreplaceable data is paramount. Yes, if you lose more drives than what the redundancy level in ZFS can handle (depending on how you configured it), you loose everything. On the flip-side, it is true that you only loose the data on the drives that died with Unraid. However, I would caution by saying that hopefully it wasn't the drive holding your personal photo collection.

 

My points aren't to suggest in anyway that ZFS is superior, or that Unraid's array is inferior, or whatever. My point is that people need to focus less on the nitty gritty and just have a proper backup strategy, regardless which option you choose. People like to go "ya, ya, I know," but IMHO, I don't think it gets emphasized enough. Yesterday I was reading a thread on Reddit where someone was suggesting that "if you value your data, you would use ZFS." I immediately rolled my eyes, because like I said, people get too caught up in the nitty gritty. My reply to that would be, if you actually cared about your data, you would have backups. Even with Unraid, I see people bring up the fact that you can still access the data on drives that didn't die, but there was no emphasizing proper backups regardless of the fact.

 

I'm not suggesting that people cannot talk about and/or discuss their differences on a technical level, it just has to be done while emphasizing the need for following the 3,2,1 backup strategy. Especially with home users, as people often get too caught up on all the tiny details and not looking at the bigger picture.

[MrCrispy]

24 minutes ago, guybrush2012 said:

@Danny N

What false statements have I read here about TrueNAS/Proxmox?
 

1. Reliability: If your USB stick fails during Unraid, your server is gone. With TrueNAS, all SSDs/HDDs/NVMEs have to be broken at the same time. Because TrueNAS writes itself into every device. That's what you do in the enterprising sector if you value reliability.

 

2. TrueNAS or Proxox products are not well tested? Whenever I reported a BUG to the Proxmox developers, it was fixed within a few hours. With Unraid there are bugs that won't be fixed for years. Look at MACVLAN/BR0, USB passthrough, Realtek 2.5Gbit power saving mode.
 

It's better if I don't start talking about the advantages and disadvantages of Unraid/TrueNAS/Proxmox.

 

Everyone here says it's a great subscription model, but nobody changes their Basic or Plus for Starter or Unleashed.

Instead of talking, the license changes and supports Limetech.

 

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.

Edited March 29 by MrCrispy

[Spec7re]

55 minutes ago, guybrush2012 said:

@Danny N

What false statements have I read here about TrueNAS/Proxmox?
 

1. Reliability: If your USB stick fails during Unraid, your server is gone. With TrueNAS, all SSDs/HDDs/NVMEs have to be broken at the same time. Because TrueNAS writes itself into every device. That's what you do in the enterprising sector if you value reliability.

 

That's actually not true.

 

If your Unraid USB died, as long as you had a backup of it, you can just load it on to another USB and your back to where you were. Furthermore, assuming you used the Unraid array, you can still read the drives off the server to recover your data if needed. Truenas boots off a dedicated drive, it doesn't write itself to all the devices on the server...just the drive, or drives (depending how you configured it) it was installed. However, if your boot drive fails, you can restore it, providing you have a back up copy of the config file. Oh and if you encrypted your pools on Truenas, you also have to make sure you also have a backup of the encryption key, because you will not be able to access your data if you failed to do so.

 

It doesn't matter which option you use, all of them can fail and they all have their gotcha's when it comes to restoring them.

 

55 minutes ago, guybrush2012 said:

2. TrueNAS or Proxox products are not well tested? Whenever I reported a BUG to the Proxmox developers, it was fixed within a few hours. With Unraid there are bugs that won't be fixed for years. Look at MACVLAN/BR0, USB passthrough, Realtek 2.5Gbit power saving mode.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect fixes within hours. It all depends on the issue, some can be easy to fix, while others can take far longer. It depends on the issue and how much is required to fix it. Furthermore, some issues can be outside the control of the devs, especially when your dealing with opensource. For example the ZFS data issue not long ago had to be fixed by the ZFS devs before it could be rolled out to all the solutions that use it. So sometimes, it's out of your control. Thankfully it was fixed relatively quickly, but sometimes that may not always be the case.

 

It could be that the issues you had were easily fixable, but I wouldn't be expecting Proxomox devs to fix all issues within hours every time, it's unreasonable.

Edited March 29 by Spec7re

[MrCrispy]

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?

[Niklas]

16 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

It would be quite trivial for Unraid to backup your usb and relevant server data to cloud storage.

 

"They" do if you use Unraid Connect. 

Edited March 29 by Niklas

[itimpi]

16 minutes ago, MrCrispy said:

It would be quite trivial for Unraid to backup your usb and relevant server data to cloud storage.

Do you mean something different to the current Unraid Connect feature?

[SpencerJ]

10 hours ago, HOLISTICAGENT said:

Did you know if this is possible? 

@SpencerJ

please contact support around this.  Thanks 

[MrCrispy]

1 hour ago, Niklas said:

 

"They" do if you use Unraid Connect. 

Didnt know this, that is great news !!

[MrCrispy]

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

Do you mean something different to the current Unraid Connect feature?

sorry, didn't know this was already done!

[sonisame]

I have two legacy plus licenses, wondering which upgrade path should I take. I just don't like paying yearly upgrade fees, but hey software development and constant maintenance is not free, Unraid is a solid product with good support and community.
I think these new pricing tiers are justified. and definitely thumbs up for grandfathering old folks like us..

Sam

[JonathanM]

10 minutes ago, sonisame said:

I have two legacy plus licenses, wondering which upgrade path should I take.

Do you need more devices? If not, no urgency.

[MrCrispy]

23 minutes ago, sonisame said:

I have two legacy plus licenses, wondering which upgrade path should I take. I just don't like paying yearly upgrade fees, but hey software development and constant maintenance is not free, Unraid is a solid product with good support and community.
I think these new pricing tiers are justified. and definitely thumbs up for grandfathering old folks like us..

Sam

 

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.

[BRiT]

8 hours ago, Danny N said:

truenas and promox will not priories features home users want while unraid will,

Have you seen the unraid roadmap? If so could you share it with the rest of us? I'm sure we'd love to have a look at what future unraid versions will provide.

 

Thanks!

 

[HOLISTICAGENT]

4 hours ago, SpencerJ said:

please contact support around this.  Thanks 

Thanks, but I have decided that this is now a Stockholm syndrome solution for me.

 

Wish you and the unraid team the best.