I hope so too - though the initial impressions of how the migration from free to paid have gone doesn't seem too good. But early days yet!

 

Flexraid with it's realtime engine storage pooling is certainly a close match technology wise for unraid.

The timing seems a bit off for FlexRAID to go commercial now...  Is it really any better than Storage Spaces?

 

As much as I've lost confidence in Tom's ability to update unRAID in a timely manner, that's nothing compared to my complete lack of confidence in the FlexRAID developer...  I can't imagine switching to FlexRAID.  Storage Spaces still looks interesting, although the performance data isn't great, and it seems to have some quirks.

The timing seems a bit off for FlexRAID to go commercial now...  Is it really any better than Storage Spaces?

 

As far as I can gather storage spaces will still stripe your data. So flexraid (and unraid) is still a completely different paradigm.

 

I wouldn't compare the two.

 

It's great microsoft are shipping something like storage spaces but unless things change before release I don't see it filling the same niche as unraid, flexraid or snapraid (each of which are individual in features again in their own right). But perhaps future releases...

 

As much as I've lost confidence in Tom's ability to update unRAID in a timely manner, that's nothing compared to my complete lack of confidence in the FlexRAID developer...  I can't imagine switching to FlexRAID.  Storage Spaces still looks interesting, although the performance data isn't great, and it seems to have some quirks.

 

My small hope is now flexraid is a commercial product things will 'get better'. I think this could be optimistic but time will tell. The author seems, at least, to have been consistently active on the forums for a good while now - no more disappearances.

 

But again storage spaces = striping - might be interesting to see what comes of it once it's reached a full release and if there are api's into it for other products to layer on top.

Except drobo sucks.

 

well we all know that...im just sayin..lol

 

why does it sell so well ?

i don't get it

yes it's easy to use but there are so many comments of incompatible hard drives

why does it sell so well ?

 

 

Concept is great..more storage space than typical RAID strategies, in a nice package.

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.

 

I agree, and that is a good reason why people should be wary of unRAID.  I have been using it over a year now, in large part because I have not yet found better options but it is time for me to take another look at flexraid and snapraid.  In my experience, you will definitely need to get use to the CLI as the unraid GUI is really unstable.  Every time I have an issue, the web interface is useless.  The default interface can't close any files, so if you use it for anything, and I mean anything besides a file server files will be locked and it is too dumb to know how to kill the process and close the files.  Want to install any sort of streamer, downloader, ripper, transcoder, whatever, expect an error trying to shut down the system with it complaining that it files are locked. 

 

Unmenu is much, much better when it works, but every time my system acts up, unmenu has crashed.  I just rebooted it tonight (from the cli, with unmenu crashed and the default web interface refusing to shutdown, natch) and right after a fresh reboot and booting into unmenu I find that any links I click in unmenu send me to a page with the super helpful

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0

 

Which sadly half of the users here have probably seen before.  When considering your options think twice about how much time you want to spend on this forum, the default answer I saw when I was investigating it was how helpful and active the forum was, what I didn't realize was that there is a reason the forum is so active, anyone who wants to get anything done has to come here and ask for help.

 

Search around. You might be stunned to see the percentage of threads here asking simple things like how do I reboot, how do I remove duplicate files, how do I install a bit torrent client (or now that I have installed a bittorrent client, why can't I shutdown?) compared to other forums, these are things you wouldn't think to look for on a ubuntu or windows home server forum because you take them for granted, but after a year with unraid I don't take them for granted.

 

In unraid's defense, I was able to add a drive and keep all of my old data.  But the rub, as always with unraid, is how much effort it took, I shut the system down, added a drive, started it up and found it couldn't see any of my data, had lost all of my drive mappings and that I had to manually tell it which drive was which based on serial number.  Don't worry, you can just post here, someone will walk you through how to do all of it, and you will be fixed up by tomorrow.  Unless you wanted it to just work....today, then maybe unraid isn't your best choice.

 

Just offering an alternative perspective, there are a lot of people here who visit the forums every day and will be very helpful with your questions and sing unraid's praises, but I find people who don't live to contribute code to this project might have something else to say about it. Coming here and asking for alternatives is kind of like going to a Mustang forum and asking what people think of the new Camaros.

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.

 

stuff

I mostly agree with everything you have said.  I would like to point out one thing though.

 

unRAID, especially pre version 5 was NEVER designed to be run with addons/plugins/additions.  That is the short simple truth of it.  So unMenu and all of things that came along with it were by all rights hacks to the system.  As someone who has spent a fair amount of time developing and contributing such hacks I think we did a darn good job of it considering. 

 

From 5.0 onward (especially 5.1) I think we will see an improvement in addons/plugin/additions and I very much look forward to it.

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.

I doubt you'll ever get better than that from software raid on an 5400-7200rpm drive array.

If you need speed over storage switch to spriped mirror raids or hardware raid and10,000+rpm drives.

 

Unraid even with its issues is the best option for what its meant to do. Long term storage of write once read many times protected array.

 

Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk 2

ZFS love to put this out there for a number of reasons....

 

but i do believe the unequal size drive usage of unRAID beats all the other reasons hands down.....

I can't argue about the GUI, but I would submit that in general, true NAS devices are set-and-forget. The only time we really have to screw with them is when something goes wrong. Threads that are full of "my system crashed" are usually answered with "because I was running add-on X and it crashed". As Prostuff said, all the extra functionality in unRAID that ask it to do things totally outside its original design are just hacks, and they can behave as such. But in the end, they aren't a fault of unRAID.

 

ZFS love to put this out there for a number of reasons....

 

but i do believe the unequal size drive usage of unRAID beats all the other reasons hands down.....

 

ZFS, in my opinion, is the BEST filesystem for long term data storage. Having said that, my priorities have shifted these past few months because of the loss of Hitachi drives and the unfair pricing of "new" hard drives. I have come to realize that preserving the life of my drives is more important than ever, and the simple fact that unRAID leaves my drives spun down until I need them means they will live a LOT longer in my system than in any striped configuration.

 

As with any software choice, it comes down to your personal checklist of what's important, and what isn't. If Plex crashes my server because it gobbled up all the memory, then I can live without Plex on unRAID. If unRAID doesn't restore my data from parity, or fails to deliver on any of its core competencies, then it fails my checklist.

From 5.0 onward (especially 5.1) I think we will see an improvement in addons/plugin/additions and I very much look forward to it.

 

That sounds promising, I was actually about to tear down my unraid setup and rebuild it with something else but maybe I should give 5 a try first.  Have you had better luck with it?  It is true that it is sold as a storage device only, I think a lot of the criticism comes from people saying what it "can" do, not what it should do. 

 

If I bought was asking friends for advice on vehicles to buy and asked, can I haul a full size mattress with a Toyota Camry they would probably answer, well you could, but it would be a harrowing experience and you would probably regret it.  When I was researching unraid initially and someone asked "can it run X" the answer was always, sure, no problem, it's great, I do it all of the time.  Had the answer been "yes, it has been done, but it is frought with peril, your system may become unstable, and it wasn't really designed for that" I probably would have either skipped unraid, or used it as storage only, using my mac mini for all server functions and been left with a much better view of it.  For storage only I think it is a great system, so for prospective customers I guess you need to ask yourself is storage alone enough these days?  Do you really want to run one nas and one downloader?  One nas and one streamer?  Even nas boxes running arm these days will download and serve media for you, there isn't a huge market for a box that only serves files these days, but does not help you manage them (and creates duplicates but gives you no easy method to clean them up).  I was really attracted to the idea of spinning my drives down to save power but realistically given the extra time invested vs my previous solution that did not spin the drives down this only saved me money if my time was worth about 50 cents an hour.  All comments are on version 4.7, 5.0 may be an entirely different ball of wax, in which case ignore my comments.

 

is 5.0 even an official release yet, or is 4.7 still the official stable release? 

Thought I'd chime in on this thread...

 

First, I want to thank everyone who has supported, and continues to support unRaid over the years.  I never dreamed that hacking the linux md-driver in late 2005 would lead to the continued development of unRaid today.

 

unRaid started because I purchased a 50" plasma TV in the spring of 2005(!) in order to watch HDTV, which many of you will remember was just starting to become widely available OTA (yes I put a specialized antenna on my roof).  Soon, this also led to hooking up a computer in order to display home video and DVD playback.  Also about that time, DVD ripping software also started to become very easy to use, hence naturally led to creating a PC-based DVD server (anyone remember myHTPC?).  Then one day, one of my "white label" (remember those?) 250GB hard drives took a dump along with hours of ripped DVD's.  My professional background had been in "enterprise storage" (Sun's Network Storage division among others), so I thought, "What I need is a parity-protected array."  Since I didn't want to re-rip or copy everything that already existed on individual hard drives to a RAID-5 array, I thought, why not just leave individual hard drives alone and just add block-level parity protection.  A couple months of hacking the linux md-driver resulted first unRaid system.

 

The name 'unRaid' is a play on the old 7-Up marketing scheme where 7-Up was called the "un-Cola". (Now I hope I don't get sued by 7-up for trademark infringement or something 

 

To make a long story short, fast forward to present.... I think unRaid offers a very specialized and unique feature set.  I've always said that unRaid is not for everyone, and I have actually turned away lots of business and issued lots of refunds to people who discovered it just wasn't the right solution for them.

 

I'm really sorry development has not progressed at a faster rate.  First and foremost, I am a programmer, and there are many many features I want to implement, but, I'm also a business owner and family guy, which means many things compete for time (as I'm sure everyone knows).  Also ever present in my mind is a certain paranoia about introducing bugs that cause user data loss, coupled with a really diverse set of hardware to support, and reliance on other "dubiously" tested open source projects (linux, samba, netatalk, drivers, etc. etc.) and sometimes development comes to a crawl.

 

No doubt a great competitor will emerge, and I will wish them luck, but my commitment to unRaid for the foreseeable future is still unwavering.  I'm working as hard as possible to get "5.0 final" done, at which point I think more rapid development will take place.  For example, the entire webGui will be placed on github and open to anyone who wants to put their mark on it.  The very first feature going into 5.1 will be "multiple array" with specialized support for 2-disk arrays: Raid-1 optimizations.

 

So thank you again for being part of the forum, and it's time for me to get back to work....

I appreciate your post limetech! I may not have been a user for long, but have followed unraid since 2007.

 

Whilst I agree unraid is not for everyone, I prefer to think it is for the enthusiast, meaning someone who enjoys messing with their collection and testing new things. I have been lucky in my first build went off without a hitch and everything has worked well. I came into this with little linux experience, but have ran into no issue the forum or google couldnt handle.

 

The only real issue I've had was with the atheros nic, which I knew might be a problem. One line in crontab has basically fixed this for me and my system is largely set and forget. Granted I love tinkering so I mess with my unraid box whenever I get a chance.

 

If you don't mind a little tinkering, unraid may be right for you. If you want a good featured media server, unraid might be right for you. If you want tons of add-ons, you may not have an issue, but be prepared to get your hands dirty in the process. As said in this thread, the extra featured provided by plugins and other add-ons are essentially hacks, and can act like so.

 

One feature I think should make it into basic, and might once your multiple array and parity features are up and running, is the cache drive. It makes unraid more flexible. Or maybe a new license level, basic extended, for $10-15, that allows two data, a parity, and  cache drive. Some users don't need or want the 6 discs in pro so they do without cache, but would probably pay the little amount to have the cache drive.

 

Sent from my HTC Vivid

 

EDIT: thought ProStuff said that in another thread, but it was just a few posts up, edited to reflect,

Great story Tom...

 

Love the "un-cola" thing

Thanks for going over the genesis moment that started all this, Tom. In spite of all the negativity you might be reading, I think most people are simply frustrated. I realize many of the bumps in the road lately have been created by reliance on other open source works that have failed in one way or another. As a developer myself, I know what it's like having people patting their foot. But I also know the pain of delivering something on time that is not finished. Making the GUI open source will surely help polish things, as you can concentrate on the back end and leave the endless front end tweaking to the community. Just keep chugging along.

 

Oh, just out of curiosity, did the "Lime" in Lime Technology came from Sprite, the 7-up competitor?

I think the "Lime" came from the look his wife started giving him when he started spending hours locked away building unraid. One would expect "lemon" to describe the sour look, but "Lemon Technology" just doesn't have a stable ring to it, 

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

Runs fine with an hp microserver.... Smoother than win7 or win server

Sent from my LG-P990 using Tapatalk 2

... I want to thank everyone who has supported, and continues to support unRaid over the years.  I never dreamed that hacking the linux md-driver in late 2005 would lead to the continued development of unRaid today.

 

On behalf of the 10K+ users on this forum I would also like to thank you for all of your hard work. I'm sure you don't hear it enough. It's great to hear (and see, based on all of the RCs at the moment) that 5.0-Final is not far away and I'm sure 5.1 will be "the new 4.7" once it is released. As much as I love unRAID and would hate to see the project come to a stall, please don't ever let it get in the way of spending time with your family. Most of us will still be around even months later, supporting new users and giving you plenty of reading material upon your return IMO unRAID really does deliver as advertised like no other product.

 

It's great to hear that you have issued refunds for users who didn't find unRAID suitable for them, this is one way to build a very successful business. Chances are that some of those users may come back if the project develops further and starts to meets their needs, had they been blatently refused a refund it would have likely only created a negative buzz/feedback on other sites; hat's off to you Tom.

 

No doubt a great competitor will emerge, and I will wish them luck, but my commitment to unRaid for the foreseeable future is still unwavering.  I'm working as hard as possible to get "5.0 final" done, at which point I think more rapid development will take place.  For example, the entire webGui will be placed on github and open to anyone who wants to put their mark on it.  The very first feature going into 5.1 will be "multiple array" with specialized support for 2-disk arrays: Raid-1 optimizations.

 

All I can say is good luck to the competition, especially for what we pay for unRAID- the value for money is second to none. I know you're a one man army (or at least I think you are!) and while this can limit the pace of development, I think it is worth the wait. I have no hesitation in moving to 5.0 once it is out of RC status, the only reason I haven't yet is because 4.7 does everything I need. I very much look forward to 5.1's multiple arrays as only last night I was reading and replying to this thread where another user was asking about that exact feature. I'm sure we will hear more details about this once 5.1 is in the works.

 

Again Tom, thanks for all of your hard work and don't ever let any of the negative comments on the forum get you down

For example, the entire webGui will be placed on github and open to anyone who wants to put their mark on it.  The very first feature going into 5.1 will be "multiple array" with specialized support for 2-disk arrays: Raid-1 optimizations.

 

 

I have a question for the multiple array. I am reading this in that there will be multple arrays as in

 

 

1 large unRAID array (i.e. protected JBOD)

1 RAID1 array possibly for cache.

 

 

Or will we have the ability to have multiple unRAID arrays (i.e. multiple protected jbod arrays).

For example, the entire webGui will be placed on github and open to anyone who wants to put their mark on it.  The very first feature going into 5.1 will be "multiple array" with specialized support for 2-disk arrays: Raid-1 optimizations.

 

I have a question for the multiple array. I am reading this in that there will be multple arrays as in

 

1 large unRAID array (i.e. protected JBOD)

1 RAID1 array possibly for cache.

 

Or will we have the ability to have multiple unRAID arrays (i.e. multiple protected jbod arrays).

 

Perhaps I was off the mark with sub-arrays (multiple unRAID arrays)..  Could you clarify Tom?

I think the real competitor, or one of them... may be born with the appearance of the arm boards like the new KTT30 with a Tegra 3 CPU.

 

Arm processors can launch the energetic consumption to levels unthinkable until now.

 

Also know which competitors are able to make the Arm version.

[...] The very first feature going into 5.1 will be "multiple array" with specialized support for 2-disk arrays: Raid-1 optimizations.

Just an idea... would it be possible to overcome the relatively slow parity disk, by creating a 2nd unraid array consisting of let's say, 10 or 20 SSD's packed together, and use THAT 2nd SSD-array, as the 'parity disk' for 'classic' disk array nr 2? (i'm not talking costs here )

It's not.currently possible with unraid as a second array isn't possible but I believe it is possible using a hardware raid card. Never really looked into it but I'm pretty sure I've read about people using raid to pool a couple faster drives together as a single parity disk. You'd have to search the forums to find it though.

Just an idea... would it be possible to overcome the relatively slow parity disk, by creating a 2nd unraid array consisting of let's say, 10 or 20 SSD's packed together, and use THAT 2nd SSD-array, as the 'parity disk' for 'classic' disk array nr 2? (i'm not talking costs here )

Note that in normal use the parity disk only impacts performance if you are writing to two or more array drives at the same time.  For the average use of "write occasionally - read a lot" there is minimal benefit in a faster parity drive. 

 

If you are writing a lot to different array drives then a faster parity drive can help significantly since each write to an array disk requires the array disk to be read and written and the parity disk to be read and written.  As an extreme case, writing simultaneously to three different array disks would require a parity disk to be three times faster than them in order not to impact performance.

 

It's not.currently possible with unraid as a second array isn't possible but I believe it is possible using a hardware raid card. Never really looked into it but I'm pretty sure I've read about people using raid to pool a couple faster drives together as a single parity disk. You'd have to search the forums to find it though.

 

 

Just an idea... would it be possible to overcome the relatively slow parity disk, by creating a 2nd unraid array consisting of let's say, 10 or 20 SSD's packed together, and use THAT 2nd SSD-array, as the 'parity disk' for 'classic' disk array nr 2? (i'm not talking costs here )

Note that in normal use the parity disk only impacts performance if you are writing to two or more array drives at the same time.  For the average use of "write occasionally - read a lot" there is minimal benefit in a faster parity drive. 

 

 

If you are writing a lot to different array drives then a faster parity drive can help significantly since each write to an array disk requires the array disk to be read and written and the parity disk to be read and written.  As an extreme case, writing simultaneously to three different array disks would require a parity disk to be three times faster than them in order not to impact performance.

 

 

It's possible to pool multiple drives together via hardware raid using an areca card.

I use the ARC-1200 to create a SAFE 33 arrangement with two 1.5TB drives. I have a 2TB RAID0 parity disk and a 350GB RAID1 cache.  I purchased the card on eBay for around $99.  it's been well worth the expenditure as it increases the ability to write in multiple places with lower overhead. This is important to me as unRAID is my main and only file server. it serves well for torrents too.

 

 

Since the areca cards also have a write back cache that can be enabled, it helps a great deal for multiple writes. The larger you card, the larger your array and/or cache. Keep in mind that you will require a UPS for this functionality to be safe.

 

 

Since the cost of the areca is affordable, it's one of the reasons I suggested having more data drives rather then insisting on a RAID1 software cache.  It's harder to add data drives via unRAID then it is to add/manage the parity or cache drive on the Areca.

Although that may not make sense... there is currently a strict limit of 26 drives for unRAID.  With boot, parity, cache, that leaves a max of 23 data drives or a max of 22 data drives if one drive was used for a raid1 software cache drive. In that case, I would rather have another data drive and use the Areca until the unRAID 26 drive limit is lifted.

 

 

With the Areca, you could pool a bunch of smaller drives to the 2tb or 3TB limit. What you loose is the ability to do smart checks on individual drives without a specialized too. BubbaQ made a specialized tool to grab smart info from the controller. You do loose the ability to spin particular drives in the areca array up or down. The areca bios gives you a time out fact of up to an hour. However it's all or nothing for the areca array drives.