Pricing tiers are outdated.


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Hello, I have been on UnRaid trial for about 3 weeks, I am enjoying the product, simplicity, dockers, vm's, dual parity and cache is great. 

The problem is that is seems like the pricing tiers were made for a time when drives had lower capacity and it really seems unfortunate for a home user that is not in an enterprise environment. 

Here is my setup so far, 

parity 1.5Gb hdd

parity 1.5Gb hdd

disk1 640Gb hdd

disk2 640Gb hdd

disk3 256Gb ssd

disk4 250Gb ssd

disk5 250Gb hdd

disk6 250Gb hdd

disk10 1Tb hdd usb

disk11 1Tb hdd usb

disk12 1Tb hdd usb

disk13 1Tb hdd usb

disk14 500Gb hdd usb

disk15 500Gb hdd usb

disk16 500Gb hdd usb

disk17 500Gb hdd usb

disk18 500Gb hdd usb

 

cache 240Gb ssd

cache2 240Gb ssd

cache3 240Gb ssd

cache4 240Gb ssd

 

Flash 32Gb usb

 

As you can see I am well over the Basic or Plus plan and my only option is Pro with unlimited attached devices. However I am just a home user. Although I work in IT on many enterprise products.

I feel this is an outdated pricing structure especially since I could just go out and get two 10Tb hdd and basic would work fine of coarse that's not what I want to do as the cost of these drives is the reason I have so many installed I had just laying around. This would cost me more money in long run and Limetech would lose money because I could choose basic plan.

The problem I feel is that Limetech is losing money on the structure they have in place where enterprise users might be throwing in 6 attached devices at high capacity where home users on a budget that have many unused devices can't take advantage of them unless you go with pro plan even though the total array is at a lower capacity. 

I really feel the difference between home and enterprise products is the service offered to end users. I would suggest Limetech reconsider pricing structure to reflect this, and just have two plans both with unlimited storage devices, Home basic at $59 which has no support but the forums and a pro enterprise $199 (a drop in the bucket to any serious company) that comes with complete phone and remote support on a service plan for a year, which could be extended over time and priced accordingly which would gain Limetech more revenue in the long run. 

 

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Not really addressing your point, but your post makes me question if it is really a good idea to want to use so many "just laying around" small disks.

 

Parity by itself can't rebuild any failed disk. ALL bits of parity PLUS ALL bits of all other disks must be reliably read to reliably reconstruct a disk. More disks means more opportunities for problems. "Just laying around" disks may be old and already have issues. Larger disks will typically perform better due to increased density.

 

Just some things to think about.

 

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Realistically most home users also don't have room for 24 drives. Most prefer using less dives of higher density. If you think of the cost involved in finding a case that can hold all of those drives vs how much data a home user generally needs most will opt for a less but slight more expensive drives. Not to mention the pure size, energy costs noise etc.

Yes a lot of users here do have 24 bay servers but I would venture to guess most if not all have that many slots for the reason of having higher capacity not for the purpose of using a lot of small drives.

I do like the whole concept of unraid allowing what you are doing. And there's nothing that wrong with it. Sure it may be less "safe" but it could be storing non critical data or its an additional back. It gives some use to old drives.

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Yes I agree that was a low ball number pulled out of a hat, I'm not a sales person, haha.. 

But I do believe that Liimetech is selling itself short on an incredible product at the enterprise level. 

 

I am in field service and frequently service Pure Storage, Violin Memory and Hitachi Data Systems, obviously these are different products from what you're offering. Complete hardware and software solutions with enterprise support vs  just the Unraid OS.  I'm not trying to complain like I can't afford the pro price, I just think that there are two environments, home and enterprise and you should reflect this. 

 

For instance esxi free for consumers to a certain point and pay on Enterprise for all options. 

The free version gets their foot in the door for IT minded folks at home, so they're more apt to use it in their business environments.

Edited by FrostyOne
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On 1/9/2019 at 12:40 PM, trurl said:

Not really addressing your point, but your post makes me question if it is really a good idea to want to use so many "just laying around" small disks.

 

Parity by itself can't rebuild any failed disk. ALL bits of parity PLUS ALL bits of all other disks must be reliably read to reliably reconstruct a disk. More disks means more opportunities for problems. "Just laying around" disks may be old and already have issues. Larger disks will typically perform better due to increased density.

 

Just some things to think about.

 

I am new to Unraid and still learning, thank you for the suggestions, I did preclear all disks and they all showed good on report something which I feel Limetech needs to add instead of a plugin. I was unaware of the need to do this and at first setup I just added a parity and two disks and let Unraid clear and format, it was later discovered one of the disks failed smart report, so I put that drive in the recycle box and started over making sure to preclear every disk with the plugin before adding to array. 

The data on the array isn't very critical, the usb drives are in a pool to support a media share, ssd's are set for lightroom working share I have a separate backup system for lightroom storage, and hdd are set for document data, I do keep an external backup of the lightroom and document shares where they go to previously built freenas system that's housing a bunch of WD reds. The unraid system I set up with a new ryzen CPU so I can play with more VM and see if I could use these drives I had laying around.

Edited by FrostyOne
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1 hour ago, FrostyOne said:

I did preclear all disks and they all showed good on report something which I feel Limetech needs to add instead of a plugin. I was unaware of the need to do this and at first setup I just added a parity and two disks and let Unraid clear and format

Strictly speaking preclear isn't necessary. It is just one way to test disks.

 

The only scenario where Unraid requires a clear disk is when adding a disk to a new data slot in an array that already has valid parity. This is so parity will be maintained since a clear (all zero) disk has no impact on existing parity.

 

When Unraid requires a clear disk (which is only that one scenario) it will clear it if it isn't already clear. In older versions of Unraid it would take the array offline while it cleared a disk (for only that scenario) so preclear was invented to allow a disk to be cleared before (pre) adding it to the array.

 

But Unraid now clears disks when needed without taking the array offline, so preclear has hung around as a test. There are other testing methods including the diagnostic utilities provided by the disk manufacturers as a free download.

 

An additional bit of info, parity is not a formatted disk so it would not be formatted or cleared. And it wouldn't have needed to clear any disks in the scenario you mentioned if you had added them all at once including the parity disk.

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Well I'm biting on pro licence today, though I still feel that the price structure could be improved, HDD count seems like a poor way to licence this product. 

Why not licence on host hardware core count instead, that is the way every company is going in the future with licencing, and really the need to have a vm host environment to begin with, for instance Microsoft and it's core licencing for server, what if you build a box and don't want to pay for all that licencing for all those cores on your new Zen server? ESXI and Unraid to the rescue to help utilize the complete hardware system. 

It would give Limetech two products, consumer and enterprise, then they could actually charge a decent price for enterprise and stop giving it away so cheap. 

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8 hours ago, trurl said:

You're welcome "Newbie". That is your name right?

Not too many people in the forums into Polish science fiction.  The whole Trurl/Constructor thing is a mystery.  Should have made your descriptor Klapaucius.  Trurl would then be the easy one to type.

 

Have you built any interesting robots lately? 😀

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On 1/11/2019 at 12:37 PM, PSYCHOPATHiO said:

Honestly the price is low for a one time payment and & life time support, I have 2 licenses & thinking of a third as a support for this product < is this considered advertising or spam :)

Technically the price doesn't include life time support.  The forum support is by (excellent and knowledgeable) community members largely, although LT weigh in with "meaty" issues.  However I agree the pricing is low and incredible value for money.

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3 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

The whole Trurl/Constructor thing is a mystery. 

Yes, I know. I kind of like it that way.

 

I have been using that nym on the internet since before the world wide web. It also has another meaning. My tru initials are rl.

 

More than once I have tried to create an account somewhere only to find that trurl was already taken. github was one such.

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On 1/9/2019 at 4:24 PM, FrostyOne said:

 

Here is my setup so far, 

parity 1.5Gb hdd

parity 1.5Gb hdd

disk1 640Gb hdd

disk2 640Gb hdd

disk3 256Gb ssd

disk4 250Gb ssd

disk5 250Gb hdd

disk6 250Gb hdd

disk10 1Tb hdd usb

disk11 1Tb hdd usb

disk12 1Tb hdd usb

disk13 1Tb hdd usb

disk14 500Gb hdd usb

disk15 500Gb hdd usb

disk16 500Gb hdd usb

disk17 500Gb hdd usb

disk18 500Gb hdd usb

 

cache 240Gb ssd

cache2 240Gb ssd

cache3 240Gb ssd

cache4 240Gb ssd

 

 

29

Just thought I would point out your disk 3 and 4 being ssds. You should not use ssds in part of a parity protected array as the garbage collection can break parity. It's fine to use them as unassigned drives or in the cache (or in an array with no parity drive)

Just thought i would mention in case you had them in the array :)

 

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16 minutes ago, SpaceInvaderOne said:

Just thought I would point out your disk 3 and 4 being ssds.

And all those USB disks might also give problems depending...

Technically USB disks in the array are supported, but some implementations might be unreliable, difficult to troubleshoot, or perform poorly.

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