UnRaid is used by many fricklr readers, as it is a simple and convenient way to build a NAS. UnRaid can combine a wide variety of hard drives, with the largest drive being used for parity data and thus determining the maximum size of the array.
Until now, you could use an UnRaid license with a one-time payment and receive unlimited updates.
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With the new subscription license model, you only get updates for 12 months. After that, you can decide whether you want to continue or pause the subscription. You can resume it at any time. The problem with this is that it’s not a good idea to pause the updates, as you then also no longer receive security updates.
The prices for the 12-month subscription will probably be $20 for the basic version and $45 per year for the Unleashed version. The versions differ, as with the previous permanent licenses, by the maximum number of drives you can use with them.
If you already have an UnRaid license, as an existing customer you will probably continue to receive all updates free of charge and don’t need a subscription.
My opinion on this
In principle, I can understand the business model: Software means maintenance and development effort. With a one-time payment, you can no longer generate sustainable income today.
However, there are plenty of free alternatives from the open source camp. The unique selling point of UnRaid for me was always the ability to mix and match a wide variety of drives on simple hardware and provide them as one large pool. In addition, there was an easy-to-use Docker DockerContainer platform for isolating applications. Each container includes all dependencies and runs independently of the host system. Home Assistant add-ons, Frigate, Paperless-ngx and many other self-hosted services use Docker management with a large catalog of ready-made images and a hypervisor for virtual machines.
I too had UnRaid in use for some time. However, its core competence, namely providing network drives as media server users need as a data grave, was never relevant for me.
The Docker environment was very pleasant to use and simpler than, for example, via Portainer. However, the virtualization often had issues with passthrough of USB3 devices, such as a Google Coral.
The biggest weak point for me, however, was that there are no good onboard backup or snapshot tools, which is why I switched to Proxmox some time ago.
Here, Home Assistant runs as a virtual machine for me, from which I can make snapshots during operation - e.g. before a version update - or a complete backup of the VM. If something is wrong with the update, I can go back to the previous state within a very short time.
As a NAS component - including Docker environment - I use OpenMediaVault , which I had previously been running on a VMware ESXi for many years. This is not a turnkey solution, but open source and therefore free. OpenMediaVault can be operated either in a privileged LXC container including NFS, S.M.A.R.T, etc., or as a virtual machine (which is what I do). Of course, TrueNAS (formerly: FreeNAS) or RockStor (partially paid) would also be suitable here. If you only need SMB or NFS, a TurnKey Fileserver is also sufficient.
More info: Unraid | Unleash Your Hardware
Hi! I'm Markus – the Fricklr. ⚡ Electrical engineer, 🎵 musician (bass, guitar, keys) and professionally 'something with the internet' 🌐 for over 30 years – nowadays with AI too 🤖 – a 55-year-old generalist from Bavaria, Germany.
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