Expect to be ostracised here but if your drives are “junk” (some have SMR), I got better parity performance with Windows Storage Spaces (WSS) than with Unraid. Recoverability and compatibility with old junk hardware was very good too, whereas the bits I had lying around gave me Linux driver conflicts. Trying to install ZFS on Linux gave me a headache, and I then realised I couldn’t expand the array easily when I found other cheap crappy drives to add. WSS doesn’t care, it just keeps trucking.
As for a licence, the old “upgrade from the windows 7 enterprise key that got leaked” trick did it for me. Never paid for it.
I found that I needed to spend more on components with better driver support to have a working NAS on Linux. Windows isn’t open source, but for me it was the cheapest total cost option, and you can still run your containers in it.
I reckon maybe performance is worse on write for WSS? I paid for a PrimoCache licence to fix that though, and now my SSD gets used for initial writes and slowly spools over to the array as the array is able to calculate parity and write with my 10 year old CPU.
Expect to be ostracised here but if your drives are “junk” (some have SMR), I got better parity performance with Windows Storage Spaces (WSS) than with Unraid. Recoverability and compatibility with old junk hardware was very good too, whereas the bits I had lying around gave me Linux driver conflicts. Trying to install ZFS on Linux gave me a headache, and I then realised I couldn’t expand the array easily when I found other cheap crappy drives to add. WSS doesn’t care, it just keeps trucking.
As for a licence, the old “upgrade from the windows 7 enterprise key that got leaked” trick did it for me. Never paid for it.
I found that I needed to spend more on components with better driver support to have a working NAS on Linux. Windows isn’t open source, but for me it was the cheapest total cost option, and you can still run your containers in it.
I reckon maybe performance is worse on write for WSS? I paid for a PrimoCache licence to fix that though, and now my SSD gets used for initial writes and slowly spools over to the array as the array is able to calculate parity and write with my 10 year old CPU.