laughs in truenas
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Yeah no kidding, paying for unraid?
TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) keeps getting better, for free. It does most of the same tricks that the big boy appliances do, but with your commodity hardware, at no cost.
And it does all this exceedingly well. AND if you want.. you can buy support. At your discretion.
I don’t have half the world’s RAM to give to ZFS on my budget NAS tho, and Unraid allows mismatched drive sizes, which is pretty attractive to budget users. TrueNAS is definitely great though.
If you're on a budget, paying 110$ for an unraid license certainly doesn't help your situation...
There are cheap NASes/home servers to be bought/built for a couple hundred bucks, with very limited RAM, while TrueNAS recommends 8GB minimum. It’s also often much cheaper to have the option to buy mismatched drives on sale and expand your storage over time, than having to buy matched drives, and having to plan long term for potential expansion of else have to replace a whole set of drives at once if you need more. But fair enough, yes.
I was considering grabbing a last minute legacy license, but I really don't have a use case for unraid. I need a NAS for storage and a few VMs. And my apps run on generic SBCs or NUCs which I manage through ssh/ansible. So yeah, TrueNAS it is for me as well.
I wouldn't use a proprietary OS
Especially not one I have to "subscribe" to.
The whole idea is just ridiculously stupid.
I'm down with paying as that often means good support and stability. The problem is the black box that can't be changed.
One without support for something as simple as groups and where everything has 777 permissions by design.
I’m a Pro licence owner and I tested Unraid for about a year until moving to TrueNAS and Proxmox.
While I was initially skeptical about the pricing changes, the more I learned about it the more I was okay with it. I think part of the initial problem was the talk of annual subscriptions, when in fact it’s much closer to paying for version upgrades. Their new standard licenses have come down in cost from the old perpetual licensing and the price of a version upgrade is only $36.
Yeah this seems like a really reasonable way to make this change. You also don’t lose access to Starter or Unleashed if you don’t pay that version upgrade fee, they will let you keep downloading the version you’d paid up until. Having it be a unified upgrade fee for both is nice too. I think it makes clear that it’s to cover ongoing development and support in a way that’s more transparent than a lot of software subscriptions.
They also still allow you to buy a lifetime license, even if it’s more expensive. Considering Broadcom’s VMware just removed all of their perpetual options, it’s nice to see a different company going against that trend.
I would like to see them offering lifetime upgrades at the end of your first year with Unleashed though. Paying $140 to upgrade to that rather than $36 for a year makes a lot of sense at that point. If it’s a new customer they might not want to commit upfront.
Edit:
You can upgrade from Starter to Lifetime for $209 and Unleashed to Lifetime for $149. Prices are subject to change at any time.
There you go, you absolutely can, and they only charge $9 for the privilege of doing it later on. That seems good to me.
They have all the right in the world to do so, but I have a lot of trouble with them insisting that this is “not a subscription”. Let’s call a spade a spade. It’s a subscription to get updates, with a perpetual fallback license. The only difference with JetBrains’ model, which offers the same for their IDEs (which everyone calls subscriptions, themselves included), is that Unraid still offer a lifetime tier on top. But the lower tiers absolutely are subscriptions. If it was really a “version upgrade” thing, they’d tie the payment to major versions, not a time period. It’s a time based payment in which you get something in exchange during the payment period, therefore, a subscription. The word may have connotations for them to want to avoid it so much, I won’t pretend it’s not what it is…
Otherwise, for what I actually use Unraid for, they just put themselves out of my price range and it probably won’t be my next NAS’ OS. Outside the “use any disk size” RAID-like solution, there isn’t much keeping me on the OS, and I guess I can deal with setting up MergeFS/Snapraid…
I'm inclined to agree, but it's really just semantic differences. If they really wanted to, they could just release a new major version upgrade every year, tie the license to that version, and still get an effective annual subscription.
I get your point, but if it’s just about semantics, why would they be so defensive about it not being one?
Jetbrains moved away from the purchase version model and to an actual monthly/yearly subscription model a very long time ago. I don't even think you can buy their products anymore, they're literally subscription models, no longer buy versions then get updates for a year sort of thing. You either pay them and have access or don't and lose it.
You get a perpetual fallback license even if you stop payin, which is what I was referring to. It’s pretty much functionally equivalent to what Unraid is proposing here. You pay for a first year, get a license to use that version, then need to pay again to get an additional of updates.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license
Huh, I did not know that. Wild.
I do see an advantage to tie it to a time period for the customer. If it was just tied to a major version then Unraid would have to make a decision about if a feature belongs in version 8 or version 9. Essentially locking that feature behind a paid upgrade. By making the upgrade tied to a time period they have no incentive to hold features back for the next major version.
The incentive is still there, it just presents itself differently. Nothing prevents them from withholding major changes so they happen every 13 months either. If anything, I would at least expect yearly major versions to have large changes, while they can technically do whatever they want during the year I pay for, including not pushing any updates whatsoever.
If you choose not to extend your license, no problem. You still own the license and have full access to the OS.
If your license extension lapses (as in, you do not pay your annual fee), you can download patch releases within the same minor OS version that was available to you at the time of the lapse.
Someone knows what the official minor release cadences is?
Looks like they release a new minor release ~ every year. That means you in the most optimal case (ends on the day of the new minor release) your Unraid will be supported for 2 years after your license ends and in the worst case (ends day before minor release) 1 year after your license end.
Assuming they do keep their release timing.
Not too bad actually. Especially since you can purchase another year of support at any time, so you could basically get a 1 year license every 2 years and should be covert with security updates. (Assuming they do not change their release timing much)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
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