2011-05-09, 15:19
IAmNotAUser Wrote:The interface in the current Unraid beta is much improved over the previous versions, they have made huge ground in that department. As previously mentioned the transfer speed for your FreeNAS box does seem ridiculously high without other parts of the story and your FreeNAS box may be able to do the same basic storage, but if you ever want to upgrade the size you would have to rebuy all your drives at the same time to include them in a RAID setup, Unraid caters from home users in that you only need to buy a single drive if that's all you can afford.
Use you could build your own linux live box, but you would not have Unraid-style cache disk functionality without either resorting back to a FreeNAS style homogenic RAID, or significant time and coding input. I'd rather pay the small premium.
Plus, once you've got the box set up you hardly need to look at the web interface again so does it really matter how basic it is as long as it gets the job done?
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.
As for the disk's and raid info you mentioned you were half right, you do have to rebuild an array anytime you add or remove disks however you can raid disks that don't match with JBOD or you can individually mount separate disks and still access the data, either way you never have to rebuy disks. 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 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.