unRaid or FlexRaid ? - Page 5

You can't legally split the MS family pack with someone not in the family (or household technically).

Fact: unRAID offers a discount if you purchase 2 licenses, Limetech is OK with you purchasing the two licenses and splitting them with someone other than yourself. This "can" lower the cost. Nothing more, nothing less. All you have to do is accept that in some situations it is a "pro/plus". The hassle is up to the individual, and it doesn't apply to everyone since some people build multiple file servers thus they realise the discount without the hassle, or they split it with family which can sometimes be painless.

It would be like someone saying that FlexRAID built on top of Windows is a plus because you can run any app that windows support, then having someone suggest:
* you can run windows in a Virtual Machine or hypervised
* it's a file server you shouldn't be running apps
* all the apps they need are available
* windows is a security risk bla bla...
... so it's not really an advantage.

We should just accept that FlexRAID is good when absolute flexibility is a desired outcome and unRAID is great if you just want a simple file serving appliance with the option for flexibility and usually lower than the cost of consumer NAS with lots of drives.

The OS residing on a USB stick is also a "pro" to many people since it leaves more drives for storage (you can't include the OS drive in your FlexRAID pool). Just because you have enough ports, doesn't mean that if you were provided the option of running FlexRAID via Windows-To-Go USB key that nobody would want it. I'm sure many would. Myself personally, I don't care about the USB aspect in my current server because I also use this file server to download, fetch metadata, active directory services, wsus (and planned VM for pfsense or something of that kind) and so I would not benefit from the OS being on a USB key.

I purchased a 2-pack of licenses from Lime Technology when I decided to expand my unRAID server beyond 3 drives. Since it was only a little more I figured it was good insurance to have a backup. The software installed on the flash drive turned out to be incredibly stable so I had an extra flash drive sitting dormant with very little chance that I would ever need it. Somewhere along the line I got into a conversation with someone on a forum, perhaps even this one, and I offered up the other flash drive for half my total cost. I sold the drive and the result was that I only paid $75 for the single license. I just threw this into the discussion as a possible option since it worked out that way for me.

As for splitting a Microsoft Family pack of licences, I personally don't see an issue with it. If you buy three licenses for the software and only use one or two, how is it illegal to sell the unused licences? Who's to say that the person you sold the license to isn't some distant relative? Aren't we all part of the family Homo Sapien?

FlexRAID snapshot can work with other pooling applications. But if you delete any files your parity data that lines up with those deletes will be corrupted until you run another snapshot. So it is better to use the FlexRAID pooling, which has a built in delete function which doesn't actually delete the files until a successful parity (which accounts for the removal of the deleted files).

Parity drives can be connected in any way. As long as your OS can read the drive, FlexRAID can use it. Obviously, the slower the link to the parity drive, the longer a snapshot/restore will take. This is fine for snapshot, but if you get into LIVE parity, then you want the parity on a SATA port.

As for splitting a Microsoft Family pack of licences, I personally don't see an issue with it. If you buy three licenses for the software and only use one or two, how is it illegal to sell the unused licences?

It's illegal for the same reason selling a car you don't have title to is illegal. You are defrauding the person that thinks they are buying a valid license.

Software is way different than a car, you don't own the IP you have purchased the right to use it with in the guidelines of the EULA, in most case you can't transfer that privilege to third parties, but it will vary from company to company, I honestly don't think MS is going to waste resources if you and 2 buddies agree to split the license pack up, but I'm not sure I'd post an ad on ebay trying to sell 2 of your 3 used family pack license.

From the MS Windows 7 EULA

"Family Pack. If you are a “Qualified Family Pack User”, you may install one copy of the software marked as “Family Pack” on three computers in your household for use by people who reside there. Those computers are the “licensed computers” and are subject to these license terms. If you do not know whether you are a Qualified Family Pack User, visit go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?Linkid=141399 or contact the Microsoft affiliate serving your country."

Thanks for the reply, appreciate the additional feed back on using 3rd part pooling vs Flexraid's pooling. Figure a USB 3 connection should be sufficient for the parity drive, snapshot, and live, but I''m thinking I'd only go with the snapshot, I'll duplicate data with in the pool that changes frequently like office doc's, but most everything else is updated weekly and monthly, and I believe I saw some where I could schedule snapshot raid to run daily, but I think weekly would be more than sufficient.

This.

Seems my comment was taken out of context, is it illegal, no, it's not like your robbing a bank, but yes you would be in breach of the MS user agreement and could be sued, (Samsung comes to mind here but no one is going to jail )would MS come after you, chances are slim, unless you have represented yourself as a reseller, avoid ebay.

Just a comment, I've read a lot of posts on flexraid over the weekend, and starting around the time it was announced that the product was going commercial, almost every discussion ended with the Price. I'll agree the pricing has been a bit sporadic, it's been perpetually on sale, and seems the sale price early on was lower than it is now, but like all things, the market will dictate the success or a product, I think $50 for the package would be more reasonable price for both the pooling and RaidF, but aside from product reliability, bugs, and beta users, which has been the other major topics of discussion, if the product works for my needs, chances are I'll spend $60, but the product better be stable.

I agree, but I was responding to the point that he was looking at only using three drives of either 1TB+1TB+2TB or 2TB+3TB+3TB. The more drives you add, the bigger the space gain over folder duplication, but because of the drives were of unequal size and only 3, in that particular situation, he wasn't gaining much if anything.

It's cheap, but only if you don't value your time. Not saying that its a bad solution, but if you don't know anything about Linux, the learning curve can be pretty steep, especially if you run into problems. I tried Ubuntu a few years back. While the install was easy, I spent about a dozen hours trying to get my wireless NIC working, and finally gave up (there weren't drivers for my specific brand so I had to find the chip on it, get some code and compile my own driver, which still didn't work properly). I asked a buddy of mine for help and he was the one that introduced me to the phrase : Linux is free if you don't value your time.

So if you already have experience with Linux, probably a good solution, but one of the reasons I stuck with WHS (outside of the integration with my other Windows PC's), was that I already knew the basics of how the operating system worked. I was up in running in less than an hour.

Do you actually TRY to be this obstinate?

You can say the same thing about any OS -- it all depends on what you are familiar with. I can set up a linux fileserver faster than I can a Windows 7 based fileserver. Copying a bunch of configurations into /etc/ is quicker than going through all the configuration GUIs on Windows. But, of course, for someone who knows how to set up Windows 7 for a fileserver but does not know how to set up linux, obviously the Windows server would be quicker.

And SnapRAID is available for Windows as well.

I know this post was tongue in cheek, but you technically did not buy 3 distinct licenses the same way you buy 3 separate products. The licenses are tied together, more like a site license - but restricted to 3 machines.

MS changed the terms of their technet subscription service because people were abusing it. e.g. Buy a technet sub that came with 10 keys that could be activated up to 10 times each for each version of windows and you had shady pc stores using these licenses to sell their Computers.

The new version of Office will come in a yearly subscription option that allows up to five users in a household to have office installed and kept up to date, I'm sure we'll hear about people with less than 5 family members feeling they have every right to sell off the unused "licenses"... but technically that is not legal.

In any case, I'm getting off topic so will stop.

I'll just say one last thing about splitting licences and then get off it. "Let your conscience be your guide."

There are commercial versions of linux with paid support. It sounds like your buddy doesn't understand the difference between free(libre) and free(gratis).

Also, be careful of falling into the trap of: "There's no point in learning a second language because everyone I talk to knows English" when considering the Linux learning curve. Learning a second language teaches you just as much about your first language as it does about the second one.

It's not about Microsoft; it's about the guy buying the bogus license. Put yourself in his shoes. You buy a license and then find out that not only is your license not legitimate, but that the seller knew this the whole time. You contact the seller and he says "I didn't think you'd ever find out"

This isn't a case of sticking it to MS by not playing by their rules, this is a case of stealing money from some naive, honest guy who is trying to pay for software instead of just googling for a key. Not cool.

Agreed.

Lets move move off the price issue and back on topic. I have no linux skills, I don't know windows scripting, I don't write code, but I need a Windows storage solution as I'm running other Windows Media programs on my WHS 2011 box and Flexraid is very appealing for us weekend non-tech warrior types.

I'm sure he understands it just fine. When people say that linux is free, like in this thread, they are 99.9999999% of the time speaking of cost.

And the average user doesn't give a crap about learning the language underlying computers, they just want it to do what they want, so your point is completely invalid.
Edited by ncarty97 - 9/26/12 at 5:51am

Are you using Windows Media Center as part of your HTPC?

That really wasn't too clear of an answer. Windows Media Center is part of Windows 7. I guess you'd know if you were using it though, so I assume aren't using cablecard tuners for live tv, and just using software such as Plex or XMBC for watching/streaming movies to other systems.

The point of creating a configuration is to snapshot it on a parity. If you don't have a parity drive, you have no reason to start a configuration; hence, it fails. All you can do with FlexRAID now is setup a storage pool. FlexRAID does not require a drive to be empty in order to start a parity configuration, so you can load the drives up with data and setup the configuration once you get a 3rd 3TB drive to be your parity (it MUST be a 3TB since you already have one).
Edited by jrwalte - 9/26/12 at 9:58am

You can schedule all FlexRAID parity tasks to anything you want.

It requires no more work on your part to run it once a night. If no change is detected, then the update immediately ends, so it isn't using up resources, either. This can help protect you from little things like meta data edits which could corrupt part of a restore.

I didn't use this guide, as I was already setup, so I can't tell you if it covers all you need, but it's a start. I'm familiar with the explicit mode, as all the automated modes didn't exist at that time. If you have existing folders on both your drives that you want under 1 folder name on the storage pool, you might have to setup an explicit mode config. But one of the automated modes might work. Never used them. The tutorial below does link to an explicit mode config. And I can help answer questions to your configuration if needed.

http://wiki.flexraid.com/2011/08/29/setting-up-the-storage-pool/

I'm not talking about the underlying languages. The user interface to a computer is also a language. It has context; it has grammar; it has syntax. While the average user may not care about this fact or think about it in those terms, it is relevant to the HTPC builder that wants an average user to be able to use the system as easily and fluidly as possible. This forum isn't aimed at the average user.

This is also getting way off the topic of weighing the pros and cons of ersatzraid software.

I just learned of another feature of FlexRAID. You can define multiple hard drives under a single DRU. This means you can have more than single drive failure protection, if it occurs within the same DRU. The way it works is, you can have a DRU with any multitude of hard drives, as long as it doesn't surpass the size of your PPU. So if you have some 2TB drives, one of them being the PPU, and you have 6 1TB drives, you can combine those 6x 1TB drives into 3x 2TB DRUs, and this will allow you to restore either or both of those drives within the same DRU. If 2 drives fail across different DRUs, then you aren't protected (if you have only 1 PPU), but each individual drive that didn't fail is still readable.


http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,1230.0.html

I saw that on the FlexRAID wiki when I was reading up on it. The only advantage I see for spanning two drives as a single DRU is in the even that the two spanned drives fail simultaneously, FlexRAID will treat them as one drive and will be able to restore the data across both of them. However, the chances of those two exact drives failing at the same time is slim to none.