[IAmNotAUser]

In regards to the speed differences its really quite simple, freenas is a raid solution so its going to have better I/O then unraid since its more or a JBOD solution with a parity disk. 100+ MB/s is normal for any NAS solution on the market including drobo and other "jack in the box" soultions.

I definately agree that pure NAS solutions might have a speed increase but it still feels high to be hitting the top of the gigabit Ethernet specifications with Samba consistently. But as someone who's only halfway through moving to gigabit on my home network, I can't personally say whether your benchmarks for FreeNAS are high, nor your Unraid low, just that they feel high to me. I also have my download box auto transfer completed files onto my Unraid box, so I don't ever see a transfers progress, let alone get to rate how fast it's moving.

I do have to ask though, were your tests conducted with a cache drive or not? That increased the transfer speed even on my 1/2 and 1/2 network.

or you can individually mount separate disks and still access the data, either way you never have to rebuy disks.

Which entirely removes RAID from the equation, in both any speed increase, or any redundancy.

One thing I like about unraid is that it emoloys a parity disk which is great for basic users that don't backup their data. Have you or anyone else in this tred recovered from a bad drive in unraid? was all your data recovered? how hard was it to change out the failed drive? Personally I never trust parity in raid or any other solution and I back my data up separately, yes it costs double the money to have twice as many drives but at least you know your date is in 2 places.

I back up all my important personal data with DR too, but for space-expensive things like media which technically are replaceable, having a parity disk is a suitable level for me. To me, the worst case scenario with Unraid is that I will lose the data on 2 of my disks (2nd failing before I realise the first has gone), not the whole array like a RAID solution, which I can them reacquire over time. Best case scenario is a complete rebuild from the parity disk after I catch a failed drive. But no, thankfully, I haven't yet had to rebuild my array from the parity disk.

I agree with you that the web interface isn't that important as long as the soution is doing its job however that being said as an IT professional when I pay for software I like to see that some time and coding went in to the "fit and finish" of the product, seems like unraid was thrown together by some linux coders that made the web gui last minute. Overallits not a bad product and I can see why people use it for a basic share that don't mind its lacking performance.

I'll take some screenshots of the latest beta for you tonight so you can see the improvements I'm talking about in case you haven't already. Not for any reason than that I totally agreed with you on the first impressions but after discovering the stable didn't have kernel support for USB3 (which my IcyBox caddy uses) I was forced to go beta. It feels much more like a paid-for product now, rather than a childish attempt or an afterthought.

Apologies to everyone for the massive off-topic, and I would like to note I have no ties to Unraid beyond being a recent user (6 months or so).