Ice_Black Posted March 4, 2012 Share Posted March 4, 2012 Is there any product out there that is similar to Unraid? Does the same job or better... and good support? Quote Link to comment
marcusone Posted March 4, 2012 Share Posted March 4, 2012 I agree. Not really. Ive been playing with freenas. Its nice but much more complicated. There are lots of places that can give you a comparison. But if you are doing general media storage and streaming nothing competes with unraid on a vast list of things (i.e. Power use, ease of use, etc.) Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
reggie14 Posted March 4, 2012 Share Posted March 4, 2012 I think it probably really depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for something that does exactly what unRAID does, then sure, you're going to have a hard time finding a suitable alternative. But, the same can be said for lots of things. Different products usually emphasize different features, or make different tradeoffs. In general, WHS and FreeNAS are sort of the obvious alternatives. FlexRAID looks interesting, although that's another one-man shop, which makes me nervous. Personally, I'm really interested in the Storage Spaces feature in Windows 8. That has a much different set of tradeoffs than unRAID, but I think I'd find other good uses for an always-on Windows server in my house. We'll see what happens once Windows 8 gets released and that feature gets reviewed and used a bit more, but I'm already thinking about dropping in a faster processor and more RAM into my current unRAID box and moving to Windows 8. Quote Link to comment
sacretagent Posted March 5, 2012 Share Posted March 5, 2012 well i also keep an eye out for any similar products and the choice is not big... Flexraid is not really an option as the guy who is making it promisses a lot but doesn't finishes anything ... he has now like 4 different concepts in a kind of a beta stage but none of them ever made it to stable in the last 2 years ... and every few months he starts something new that also never makes it to stable..... I agree on windows 8 maybe being a good alternative windows 8 desktop though has no start button any more and is made to work primarily with touchscreens ... so it will be a bit of a nuisance to get used to it ... i am sure it will be hacked again .. but still ... windows 7 no quicklaunch bar .. windows 8 no start menu.... windows server 8 might be a good alternative ... as i saw deduplication mentioned in one of the blogs ... which could make it interesting to say at the least ..... anyway windows 8 with thin provisioning - storage spaces and mirrorig/parity protection seems nice only disadvantage i see is the fact that all disk in a storage space will have to spin again ... you can minimize the spin a bit by making storage spaces according use ... but still .... i was playing with it on a vm machine and it works only the missing start menu is irking me out for the moment tonight going to play with the servers edition ... Quote Link to comment
daniel.boone Posted March 5, 2012 Share Posted March 5, 2012 Is there any product out there that is similar to Unraid? Does the same job or better... and good support? There are plenty of network file systems put there so I'd say similar is a yes. If your looking for expandability then Solaris/zfs is closer to unRaid. There are some add on agents for windows too. Flexraid was already mentioned. Me thinks zfs is better than any windows solution. It's the most complicated of the lot but gives the most flexibility. IMO better than unRaid I'd say no. Support well, I feel support is a typically hit or miss thing. I've delt with many a vendor. It can be trying at times. Most of the times either I need to figure it out or live with the issue. As a self supported site this is one of the best but sometimes there are problems that can only be corrected with time. I can't think of any software vendor being any different. Quote Link to comment
jamerson9 Posted March 5, 2012 Share Posted March 5, 2012 Here's a nice comparison table of features between the various solutions. http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/compare.html Quote Link to comment
abs0lut.zer0 Posted March 5, 2012 Share Posted March 5, 2012 Is there any product out there that is similar to Unraid? Does the same job or better... and good support? There are plenty of network file systems put there so I'd say similar is a yes. If your looking for expandability then Solaris/zfs is closer to unRaid. There are some add on agents for windows too. Flexraid was already mentioned. Me thinks zfs is better than any windows solution. It's the most complicated of the lot but gives the most flexibility. IMO better than unRaid I'd say no. Support well, I feel support is a typically hit or miss thing. I've delt with many a vendor. It can be trying at times. Most of the times either I need to figure it out or live with the issue. As a self supported site this is one of the best but sometimes there are problems that can only be corrected with time. I can't think of any software vendor being any different. agreed Quote Link to comment
opentoe Posted March 7, 2012 Share Posted March 7, 2012 well i also keep an eye out for any similar products and the choice is not big... Flexraid is not really an option as the guy who is making it promisses a lot but doesn't finishes anything ... he has now like 4 different concepts in a kind of a beta stage but none of them ever made it to stable in the last 2 years ... and every few months he starts something new that also never makes it to stable..... I agree on windows 8 maybe being a good alternative windows 8 desktop though has no start button any more and is made to work primarily with touchscreens ... so it will be a bit of a nuisance to get used to it ... i am sure it will be hacked again .. but still ... windows 7 no quicklaunch bar .. windows 8 no start menu.... windows server 8 might be a good alternative ... as i saw deduplication mentioned in one of the blogs ... which could make it interesting to say at the least ..... anyway windows 8 with thin provisioning - storage spaces and mirrorig/parity protection seems nice only disadvantage i see is the fact that all disk in a storage space will have to spin again ... you can minimize the spin a bit by making storage spaces according use ... but still .... i was playing with it on a vm machine and it works only the missing start menu is irking me out for the moment tonight going to play with the servers edition ... There is quick launch bar in Windows 7, and there is the START button in Windows 8. All you need to do is turn off the Metro Style touch theme. I have a Windows 8 box running right now that would be hard to tell it was even Windows 8. You would think it was a Windows 7 machine. Quote Link to comment
sacretagent Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 well i also keep an eye out for any similar products and the choice is not big... Flexraid is not really an option as the guy who is making it promisses a lot but doesn't finishes anything ... he has now like 4 different concepts in a kind of a beta stage but none of them ever made it to stable in the last 2 years ... and every few months he starts something new that also never makes it to stable..... I agree on windows 8 maybe being a good alternative windows 8 desktop though has no start button any more and is made to work primarily with touchscreens ... so it will be a bit of a nuisance to get used to it ... i am sure it will be hacked again .. but still ... windows 7 no quicklaunch bar .. windows 8 no start menu.... windows server 8 might be a good alternative ... as i saw deduplication mentioned in one of the blogs ... which could make it interesting to say at the least ..... anyway windows 8 with thin provisioning - storage spaces and mirrorig/parity protection seems nice only disadvantage i see is the fact that all disk in a storage space will have to spin again ... you can minimize the spin a bit by making storage spaces according use ... but still .... i was playing with it on a vm machine and it works only the missing start menu is irking me out for the moment tonight going to play with the servers edition ... There is quick launch bar in Windows 7, and there is the START button in Windows 8. All you need to do is turn off the Metro Style touch theme. I have a Windows 8 box running right now that would be hard to tell it was even Windows 8. You would think it was a Windows 7 machine. you have the last release running ? the new windows 8 consumer preview has nothing any more ... no way to simply turn it off by changing the registry setting as in the beta's only thing you can run on it is some vista crap like of a startmenu program that is not working completely or something must have changed in the last 3 days .... (didn't have the time to google for new solutions for the consumer preview ....) Quote Link to comment
boof Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 flexraid and snapraid are the two closest. Though neither really match 100% on feature set. Flexraid is closest with it's live engine but as has already been mentioned the development cycles are mad, feature sets are all over the place and the general ongoing nature of the project seems to change day by day. Which is a shame. snapraid is nice - simple clean and does what it says on the tin. No real-time support but for many that may not be a problem. I didn't like it because of the additional disk capacity required for it's metadata which would leave a little bit worrying about that, but it would have been manageable. I like unraids real time block level parity approach. I don't like it being it's own OS distribution or the development cycle but you have to pick and choose I guess. If unraid vanished tomorrow it would be snapraid I migrated to. Quote Link to comment
prostuff1 Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 If unraid vanished tomorrow it would be snapraid I migrated to. I am honestly not sure what I would move to, but the "core" of unRAID (the md driver) is available as source. Between that and the some of the smart guys/gals here on the forum I think we could get it figured out. I believe unRAID would live on, even if by a different name and supported by a different set of people. Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 If unraid vanished tomorrow it would be snapraid I migrated to. I am honestly not sure what I would move to, but the "core" of unRAID (the md driver) is available as source. Between that and the some of the smart guys/gals here on the forum I think we could get it figured out. I believe unRAID would live on, even if by a different name and supported by a different set of people. There's no doubt to that. A Major reason a new front end & gui has not been made is out of respect to Tom. Quote Link to comment
boof Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 If unraid vanished tomorrow it would be snapraid I migrated to. I am honestly not sure what I would move to, but the "core" of unRAID (the md driver) is available as source. Between that and the some of the smart guys/gals here on the forum I think we could get it figured out. I believe unRAID would live on, even if by a different name and supported by a different set of people. It's easy enough to get an array running now without emhttp. But we're back into the lands of then relying on a community effort for ongoing maintenance etc etc. It might work, it might not. But at that point I'd be inclined to throw my hat into open software that already has an established track record in that regard. However I'm probably an extreme case here as my last 'round' of evaluating alternatives / building and migrating to a new server a few months ago only narrowly had unraid still in the lead. Ultimately it would take me the the length of time to power off one vm, remap 3 host controllers and power up a new vm to migrate to snapraid. I would argue the open source part of unraid being forked and being made distro agnostic alongside similar management tools would be a much better solution all round than it's existing form but, as already mentioned, that would side step licensing. As well as involve taking on the md code base to maintain which from my quick look through is much more complex than, say, the snapraid source. If limetech opted to do this and so dropping the distribution maintenance aspect of unraid, allowing full effort their end to go into the core drivers and admin interface(s) rather than having to worry about maintaining an entire OS and software stack I would be quite happy. But I suspect in the minority! Quote Link to comment
opentoe Posted March 10, 2012 Share Posted March 10, 2012 It is 2012. When is something configured or maintained WITHOUT a GUI based/web based option these days? If something can't be administered via a simple web browser and you still need to rely on CLI, then I would think twice about investing anything into that program/system. Quote Link to comment
joshpond Posted March 10, 2012 Share Posted March 10, 2012 I think windows 8 will be interesting. Mainly being able to run other things easier and the main thing is greater hardware support. No nic issues. Drawback is needing newer and more powerful hardware but I suspect most people on here are running newer hardware anyway. Josh Quote Link to comment
Johnm Posted March 10, 2012 Share Posted March 10, 2012 I am seeing a lot of limitation to windows storage spaces in testing. I was really hoping to point storage spaces to my 2 unraids and let it sync them. it wanted to format the user shares.. (um NO!!!).. in testing on virtual drives. I am getting horrid write speeds in both 2 way and 3 mirroring. so far it is a lot like WHS DE meets the software raid5 in server 2008 with a fancy front end.. I am not impressed yet. Quote Link to comment
reggie14 Posted March 11, 2012 Share Posted March 11, 2012 I've read some online reviews complaining about write speeds in storage spaces using parity. People seem to be getting 10-20MB/sec. That could be a dealbreaker for me. I've not that thrilled about unRAID's 30-40MB/sec write speeds. Hopefully that's something Microsoft can improve before Windows 8 goes final. Quote Link to comment
carlos28355 Posted March 30, 2012 Share Posted March 30, 2012 i love unraid community and my unraid project personally...for argument sake wouldnt a drobo be kind of a competitor in a way? Quote Link to comment
carlos28355 Posted March 31, 2012 Share Posted March 31, 2012 Except drobo sucks. well we all know that...im just sayin..lol Quote Link to comment
Influencer Posted March 31, 2012 Share Posted March 31, 2012 I guess you could look at drobo as a competitor, but going along with the "drobo sucks" part, I think a lot of unRAID users go to it to distance from hardware RAID due to the limitations, such as if the card fails you must get the same or very similar card to access/save your data. If a drobo fails, unless you have another drobo....your screwed. If I'm right in assuming this is a main reason why most choose unRAID, I wouldn't consider Drobo competition at all. Quote Link to comment
brian89gp Posted March 31, 2012 Share Posted March 31, 2012 Snapraid looks interesting, similar in end-effect as unRAID with a cache drive (old stuff protected, new stuff not, until copy/sync job is run). Quote Link to comment
loomdog32 Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 Flexraid is not really an option as the guy who is making it promisses a lot but doesn't finishes anything ... he has now like 4 different concepts in a kind of a beta stage but none of them ever made it to stable in the last 2 years ... and every few months he starts something new that also never makes it to stable..... LOL.. I left using UnRAID to using FlexRAID ONLY because I wanted to consolidate my file server and sage server to a single box. I was going to use the current beta with WHS2011. It looked very promising. Finally a live RAID with a storage pool.... I could never recover a failure with it tho. And if you do not "upgrade" from the beta in six months, it disables itself!! If it lived up to the hype, it would be an awesome product.... Look where I am again. I never should have stopped using one of the only STABLE products on the market that actually does what it claims to do!! Quote Link to comment
sacretagent Posted April 24, 2012 Share Posted April 24, 2012 well there might be progress in Flexraid now cause he started to sell the thing... 50$ for a license so there might be some competency growing between unraid and flexraid now ... I hope Tom reads this and gets his ass into gear to bring out 5 stable Quote Link to comment
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