Smack talk from the creator of Flexraid


joeshmoe1

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Someone want to tell me why I would want to go back to maintaining a full blown distro just to run this or am I missing something?

 

You wouldn't and every NAS manufacturer tries very hard to strip everything out of whatever OS they are running, but it is nice for home users to be able to fatten it back up for the applications they desire. Hence the plugins, etc being made available.

 

 

Even the readyNAS opened up the machine at some point to allow people use of the full OS potential. 

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Surprised at the response to this here if I'm honest.

 

There's a lot of chest puffing in there (as you'd expect I guess given he wants to sell the thing ;) ) but a lot of the criticisms levelled at unraid are ones expressed on these forums quite often.

 

Flexraid has it's own spotty history of development and support - so a large pinch of salt should probably be taken...

 

..but it looks like we might have a direct competitor to unRAID which can only be good either in terms of we now have a choice - or that it might push unRAID to improve in the areas it may be lacking.

 

Watching with interest from my end.

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I'm not surprised by the reaction on here. He directly confronted unRAID in his post, and was admittedly antagonistic. That begets a defensive response on behalf of those who are invested in unRAID in some way. His talking points are mostly valid regarding unRAID's limitations. And competition IS a good thing. But in my opinion, he could have announced his "new product" much more positively and with more class, instead of verbally assaulting unRAID as a product and Tom as an engineer on a non-storage vendor biased forum (AVS). Frankly his approach to design and business seems much more haphazard to me than Tom's.

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Surprised at the response to this here if I'm honest.

 

There's a lot of chest puffing in there (as you'd expect I guess given he wants to sell the thing ;) ) but a lot of the criticisms levelled at unraid are ones expressed on these forums quite often.

 

Flexraid has it's own spotty history of development and support - so a large pinch of salt should probably be taken...

 

..but it looks like we might have a direct competitor to unRAID which can only be good either in terms of we now have a choice - or that it might push unRAID to improve in the areas it may be lacking.

 

Watching with interest from my end.

 

didn't somebody suggest not to prod the animals?

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Surprised at the response to this here if I'm honest.

 

There's a lot of chest puffing in there (as you'd expect I guess given he wants to sell the thing ;) ) but a lot of the criticisms levelled at unraid are ones expressed on these forums quite often.

 

Flexraid has it's own spotty history of development and support - so a large pinch of salt should probably be taken...

 

..but it looks like we might have a direct competitor to unRAID which can only be good either in terms of we now have a choice - or that it might push unRAID to improve in the areas it may be lacking.

 

Watching with interest from my end.

 

Let us know how it is working for you.

 

A drive fails, and the data on the drive is unaccessible, until after a rebuild, which requires all the data on all surviving drives to be unavailable. Not a choice I'll be making.

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Let us know how it is working for you.

 

Well given it doesn't exist..I can't?

 

A drive fails, and the data on the drive is unaccessible, until after a rebuild, which requires all the data on all surviving drives to be unavailable. Not a choice I'll be making.

 

I don't think that's the case for flexraid (data on all other drives being unavailable during rebuild..but a while since I used it last)...and given the 'new' thing doesn't exist yet I don't know if that's the case for it either.

 

I very much have a 'best tool for the job' view. Here is someone bringing another tool to the table - I don't get the immediate defensive positions here. I guess I'm not as attached to unraid as some.

 

As for prodding the animals - I don't even know what that means I'm afraid.

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So how do you justify present it as a choice?

 

I'm not presenting it as anything.

 

I'm suggesting as it's aimed at a competitor to unraid :

 

- Competition is good. It will drive innovation (I hope) in both projects

- It may bring features to the table that make it a better choice (for me? for others?) than unraid. Which is also good.

 

Ergo - I am watching it with interest.

 

As it doesn't actually exist and, as I already mentioned, flexraid as a spotty history of developement itself it could all come to nothing.

 

But, again, as mentioned I'm watching it with interest.

 

This is, as far as I'm aware, the first direct competitor feature set wise to unraid (i.e block based non striped parity approach. Flexraid already does filesystem level real time non striped parity)

 

Perhaps I'm now understanding what was meant by not prodding the animals.

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It's somewhat absurd to compare unRAID to any other storage software that is out there right now.  The reason I use unRAID is because it doesn't limit me to limited bays like a Synology NAS.  A loss of one drive does not mean playback of movies is hindered unless the movie is on that particular drive.  I don't need Dual Parity for my unRAID build, because it stores JUST movies. 

 

Is it a pain to re-rip BluRay's if I lose a drive and cannot recover it?  Sure, total PITA.  However, how many movies are you getting on a 2TB/3TB drive anyway?  It's not like we are dealing with DVD's where you could saturate a 2TB drive with 256 or so movies.  We are talking 50-60 BluRay's on a 2TB disk.  So it's not bad enough to warrant me using ZFS or RAID5/6 Parity.

 

If you have private, personal data you want to preserve buy a Synology.  If all you want to do is a have a central place for movies, with some ability to recover data, then use unRAID. 

 

The guy is an asshat. 

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A loss of one drive does not mean playback of movies is hindered unless the movie is on that particular drive.

Loss of one drive means nothing is hindered. All the data is still accessible, albeit a little slower -- the parity system means the drive is being emulated.

 

When I've lost a drive, I've sometimes used that to copy the data off the "missing" drive on to another drive I have, then remove the dead drive instead of replacing it.

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A loss of one drive does not mean playback of movies is hindered unless the movie is on that particular drive.

Loss of one drive means nothing is hindered. All the data is still accessible, albeit a little slower -- the parity system means the drive is being emulated.

 

When I've lost a drive, I've sometimes used that to copy the data off the "missing" drive on to another drive I have, then remove the dead drive instead of replacing it.

When I first got my old unRAID array working I experimented. Granted it was with DVD.ISO images, but on an old PCI bus based Intel Celeron system I was able to play 4 different ISO images to 4 different media players on my LAN from the emulated disk. (the one that was missing)  Since there are only two of us in this house, and usually we are watching the same movie, that is plenty good enough for me.

 

Joe L.

 

 

 

 

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I saw that topic 2 hours ago and it made me fume, thought about whether I would post this here.

 

The guy is a douche and sometimes life is not about "the best", its about comfort. Im happy with unraid and to be honest, I would not trust my data with a software made by a self loving douche like that guy. He seems like a guy that would turn around and blame his users for his softwares shortcomings.

 

Competition is good but I value humble characteristics and this guy is blowing his own cover.

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Before I jumped on unRaid wagon, I did some extensive research, regarding types of RAID's, ZFS etc. One thing that did not make any sense to me about WHS is the fact that many WHS users have Drobo's to backup their files. So, you have another box to backup your server. Where is a logic in this? What kind a messed up redundancy is this?

 

Now, this Flexraid runs on top of such a system as what? A plugin? Frankly, FreeNas with ZFS as a standalone OS makes more sense.

 

Now, this will be a word of advice from one developer to another. Your business model is flawed. You basing your product on a software that is almost obsolete. In fact, in order to use your product, consumer must purchase WHS first. This is additional cost to a consumer. Now, have some little respect for other people and their work as a human being.

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That actually does make sense... I also back up my most important data outside of unraid... unraid is not a replacement for a backup (as whs also is not). it protects against drive failure..

 

For most, unRAID is backup. The contents of these servers is obtained from others sources (rip, download, etc). Sure recovery from double disk failure would be a measurable effort, but most likely not a capital loss. Even if it is the database for the content management system, that loss is not money, just inconvenient. My unRAID is pure backup, production is ZFS. The kids stream from unRAID, so they'll let me know if it is down...

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What I meant is, that somebody who is planning to build his/hers first server box, wants to treat this box as a backup for all home files. This a primary purpose of this activity. Now, if you telling me that yes can get WHS and backup your files, but  this files are not save because you need another box to protect it, so what is a point of having WHS at the first place.

 

unRaid is not perfect, but it's redundancy is sufficient for what it's needed.

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It is protection against drive failure, it is backup against drive failure if you want but it is NO backup against everything else that can go wrong.

 

If you call that backup; fine.

 

Like I said for most it is a backup, an additional copy of the data. In the event of a single drive failure, nothing. Everything keeps going (unlike FlexRAID), and you can replace the failed drive at your convenience.  In the event of multiple drive failure, there is some data loss, but the source (rip, download, etc) is still available. So the backup can be made again.

 

Just because you use the backup copy doesn't make it not a backup.

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Thanks to everyone who helps support unRaid... I don't know anything about the guy behind flexraid and I have not even looked at the post which prompted this thread - I don't have time for it.  I always give everyone the benefit of the doubt and if he, or any other company comes along, trying to produce storage solutions, I say, "more power to them".  It's a tough business and a lot of work.  I've always said unRaid is not for every application, but for media storage, and other classes of storage, it's really nice.  I'm sure flexraid has it's own niche.  I also regret the seemingly slow-as-molasses ongoing development.  I've been at this now almost 8 years, and during that time there have been all kinds of ups and downs, both professionally and personally.  But rest assured that I'm working very hard on releasing new code and bug fixes.

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Thanks to everyone who helps support unRaid... I don't know anything about the guy behind flexraid and I have not even looked at the post which prompted this thread - I don't have time for it.  I always give everyone the benefit of the doubt and if he, or any other company comes along, trying to produce storage solutions, I say, "more power to them".  It's a tough business and a lot of work.  I've always said unRaid is not for every application, but for media storage, and other classes of storage, it's really nice.  I'm sure flexraid has it's own niche.  I also regret the seemingly slow-as-molasses ongoing development.  I've been at this now almost 8 years, and during that time there have been all kinds of ups and downs, both professionally and personally.  But rest assured that I'm working very hard on releasing new code and bug fixes.

 

Comments like these are the exact reason I am glad I went with unRaid so long ago. 

 

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It's SEGA vs. Nintendo or XBOX360 vs PS3 or mine is bigger than yours all over again.

 

Based on the attitudes of the authors of unRAID and FlexRAID, I would say it's more like the difference between a rookie and an expert. Experts go slowly, carefully, methodically, and are a wealth of knowledge. Rookies are brash, quick tempered, easily upset, and have no clue what they're doing. Experts like Tom take the high-road when they encounter boorish behavior, because they really have better uses of their time. The FlexRAID author clearly has a lot more free time. I wonder why that is. And don't even get me started talking about Wookies.

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