Unraid Moves to Annual Subscription Pricing Model

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 think the difference is at what level:

• don't implement your own storage redundancy system at the kernel level with a small team in a closed-source fashion, because that's the kind of thing that needs many eyes, lots of experience and many millions of hours real-world usage to fully debug and make sure it work.
• do build your own system by combining pre-existing technologies that are built by experienced teams and tested/vetted by wide/popular usage.

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).

The difference between building your own car and designing your own internal combustion engine.

Also posted it because unraid is not moving solely to annual subscriptions as your title and others have indicated. Previous pro and other fully included lifetime subs are just increasing in price and a lower tier is coming in to place.