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I'm sure there are reasons for using Unraid but the original funky raid alternative they marketed has always struck me as extremely fishy. The kind of solution developed by folks who didn't know enough about the best practices in storage and decided to roll their own. I guess people like web interfaces too. Personally I'd never use it. Get Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS, learn some Docker, Ansible and Prometheus, deploy and never touch until you break it or the hardware breaks. Throw Webmin on it if you like dancing bears too.
Not everyone interested in self-hosting stuff has the time or is even interested in diving much deeper into it than necessary. That‘s why QNAP and Synology also offer value to homelabers.
Coming from Synology, where I had learned much about docker and CLI, Unraid was the perfect next step for me to get rid of my Sonology‘s shortcomings. And I figure, it won‘t need anything beyond that in the future for me. I‘ve been successfully running quite a lot of services for the whole family being supported by a sufficient GUI and very limited need for CLI.
Yeah, I guess that's the niche. I would still not trust their homegrown raid scheme though. Making storage systems that don't eat data is hard. Making it without bugs is impossible. Bugs are found by having someone's data eaten and fixed over time scaled by the size of the userbase. As a result industry standard systems like mdraid, LVM, ZFS, and more recently Btrfs used in data centers and production applications are statistically guaranteed to eat less data than Unraid's homegrown solution. I've heard it now supports those systems too so if I had to use Unraid, I'd probably be using ZFS for the storage.
It‘s no RAID. Therefore the name. Unraid shows single shares and has different options for filling up drives. So you can access each individual drive via GUI or CLI, however in its functions as a NAS it only shows combined shares. Underneath you got Btrfs, XFS or ZFS as options.
I think their scheme does fall under the RAID definition. I don't think being able to access individual drives is something that distinguishes RAID from not-RAID since there are standard RAID schemes in which you can access the data in individual drives.
The draw to me was always that you could do a RAID without needing every disk to be the same size. Parity drives just had to be the size of the largest disk in the array.
I had been thinking about buying a license previously, when it was still "lifetime." Now I'm skeptical and probably won't although good for the people who got grandfathered in to free updates, though. However, I would question how long that lasts before they're un-grandfathered-in and have to start paying for updates like everyone else.
"Now announcing UnRAID 2, UnRAID original will no longer receive updates as we focus our resources on UnRAID 2."
And "UnRAID 2" will only have a subscription model, and people will the OG lifetime license won't be grandfathered into the new license.
Like Adobe and Photoshop.
I'd say it'll happen before 2030.
But I may just be cynical at this point.
It might. I take the risk. At that point, storage cost will be lower, I'll just buy a bunch of 20TB drives and build a truenas NAS. In the meantime, I'm satisfied with unraid as I don't have to spend 2k+ to get 50TB of usable space.
Yeah, I've read about that but I couldn't buy it because you could achieve similar results with LVM, ZFS etc. albeit with a bit more thought. For example I used to have a mirror (RAID1) comprised of 1TB, 3TB, 4TB and an 8TB disks. The 1, 3 and 4TB disks were concatenated in an 8TB linear volume (JBOD) and then that was mirrored with the 8TB disk (RAID1). All using standard battle tested software - LVM, mdraid and Ext4. I got 8TB usable from it. I'd have gotten the same in Unraid. The redundancy was equivalent too. With ZFS things are even simpler. Build whatever redundant scheme you have disks for. Use whatever redundancy scheme makes sense for those disks. You could combine multiple schemes. E.g. 1TB + 1TB mirror and a RAIDz1 with 3x 3TB disks, all adding to 7TB of nice contiguous usable space with all the data integrity guarantees of ZFS. Heck if you need to do some 3-disks-in-a-trenchcoat trickery to utilize your obsolete hardware like I did, you can use LVM for that and give it to ZFS to use. When you're ready to expand, buy disks for whatever redundancy scheme you like and just add it to your ZFS pool. No fuss. You like living dangerously? Add disks without redundancy. Can't afford redundancy now but you'd like it later? Add disks without redundancy now, add redundancy later.
Unraid can use randomly sized disks, and allows expansion of an array by adding more disks. Something that traditional RAID doesn't do.
It's more like Synology but on your own hardware, much more user friendly for people that don't have the experience (or time) to set it up the hard way.
MergerFS
Not sure how traditional-traditional (hw RAID?) you're referring to but you can use different disk sizes as well as grow LVM/mdraid or ZFS. It does indeed require a bit more thought and reading to do well. On the upside it's probably much safer (for data integrity) and more performant.
As I remember ZFS did recently just add the ability to grow an array, but it's not seamless and wastes space because of some limitations with it. You also need to learn the CLI procedures to do it without breaking something, vs just clicking a button on a webUI.
ZFS also recently had a major data loss bug so I'm not sure safer is accurate.
I do use ZFS on my servers, I'm not actually an unraid user myself. But managing ZFS is not easy and takes a lot of time to learn.
You're right, raidz expansion is brand new and I probably wouldn't use it for a few years. I was referring to adding new redundant vdevs to an existing pool which has always been supported as far as I know. E.g. if you have an existing raidz or mirror, you can add another raidz or mirror vdev to the pool. The pool size grows with the usable size of the new vdev. It's just
zpool add thepool mirror disk1 disk2as far as I know. The downside being it results in less usable space - e.g. two raidz1 vdevs remove 2 disks from the usable space, whereas Unraid-raid would remove 1. For example if you have 3x 3TB and 3x 4TB disks, you'd end up with 14TB usable space with ZFS and 17TB with Unraid. On the flip side, the two raidz1 vdevs would have higher reliability since you can have one disk die in each vdev.No question. I think TrueNAS offers this too.
Imagine how many of those would be found in Unraid-raid if it was used as widely and for similar loads as ZFS. My argument isn't that there aren't bugs in storage systems. There are, and the more eyes have seen the code and the more users have lost data for more years, the fewer bugs would remain. Assuming similar competence of the system developers, ZFS being much older and ran for production loads makes it more likely to contain fewer data eating bugs than Unraid.
TrueNAS is a better option for purely a NAS
Than Unraid or DIY? I've considered SCALE but I've never used it. I know they use ZFS so it will almost certainly eat less data than Unraid's homegrown raid.
I do like dancing bears…
I may be misreading your post, but it seems like your argument against Unraid is that they "rolled their own" which is why you'd never use it and instead "roll your own"?
I think the difference is at what level:
I feel OPs critique has some truth to it. I personally would rather stay with raidz by zfs, exactly because of it's open nature (yes, they too have bugs, nothing is perfect).
This is what I meant. ☝️ If they had merely wrapped LVM/mdraid or ZFS in a nice packaging my argument wouldn't stand. They would have had equivalent data reliability to TrueNAS.
As a software developer (who's looked at ZFS' source to chase a bug,) I would not dare to write my own redundant storage system. I feel like storage is a complex area with tons of hard-learned gotchas, and similar to cryptography, a best practice is to not roll your own unless truly necessary. This is not your run-of-the-mill web app and mistakes eat data. Potentially data with bite marks that gets backed up, eventually fully replacing the original before it's caught. I don't have data for this but I bet the proportion of Unraid users with eaten data from the total Unraid userbase is significantly higher than the equivalent for solutions using industry standard systems. The average web UI user probably isn't browsing through their ods/xlsx files regularly to check whether some 5 became a 13.
The difference between building your own car and designing your own internal combustion engine.