A first look at NZFS and replacing unRAID with NZFS’s Transparent RAID (tRAID) - Page 2

So you like to make things up?

Your whole attitude has completely turned me off as a potential customer. I'm sure there are more like me and the others who have spoken up in the thread. Biases are very hard to break even if the product is superior. Look at the ATI/AMD vs Nvidia wars along with the same game with AMD vs Intel. Once people get locked into a bias, it's extremely hard to pull them out. Don't put people into a biased state because they don't agree with you methods. Embrace that and think about a proper marketing strategy/image to go along with your product... sure any attention is good but not when the take away is "what a jerk".

From a technical standpoint, I truly hope you can deliver this heavy hitting product but I really don't like the idea of this system living on top of another. In Windows' case, that's an additional license which means additional money and time spent on software and setup. Not to mention we're all too aware of the countless times Windows has decided to crap the bed and we had to deal with a down computer for an hour or 2 while troubleshooting or worse... formatting. I'd rather that not be my server.

This is quite the thread - the mistake you have made is applying what you consider simple human psychology to all your potential customers. Perhaps you didn't mean to, but it certainly seems that way. I see these kinds of generalizations on a daily basis and it only illustrates people's naivety when they attempt to assess their appeal to their potential customers.

I was actually considering further investigation of the FlexRAID product as an alternative to my existing unRAID servers (and would have considered NZFS had you simply given a feature list), but your arrogance and, quite frankly, self-defeating approach means that I will never even consider the product now on principal.

I'm sure you don't really care (hey, I don't either) but I thought I'd point out this potential flaw in your strategy anyway.

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:28pm

The unRAID users have started pouring in as predicted...

I am not a unRAID user... and this bad mouthing and unRAID bashing is simply childish in my opinion...

I run my RAID5 setup using a hardware RAID card and that is it...

This superhero software RAID that is still in beta and going to eat up the user base of a small fish 8yr old unRAID had better live up to the cannibalistic reputation that is being built up in advance before its birth...

Interesting market strategy using arrogance and antagonism to sell a product that does not yet exist in the retail market. You may be a decent software developer, but you have a lot to learn about business strategy and the proper way to sell your product.

Bring us something real and we'll be the judge. Problem is, you've probably managed to alienate the majority of unRAID users from your potential customer base. Believe it or not, they tend to be pretty loyal to a product they've been using for years and found to be extremely reliable. They have a much larger support base than FlexRAID so I'm not quite sure how you consider them to be "small fish". It's going to take a lot more than a big mouth to convince them to jump ship and switch to NZFS.

Guys...

I don't think he cares.

At the end if the day he's smart enough to know most of the success or failure is going to result from the product itself.

If its demonstrably better people will use it regardless of the confidence or arrogance if developer.

I remember when I bought my house 10 years ago I had the worst experience ever at a Home Depot. I swore I'd never go there again. I've been back hundreds of times since causes its close and easy and they had good value for what I wanted.

Everything people are saying is rubbish. hate or love now it won't matter- you'll chose yes or no based on performance features and value of the product.

Some people are just leechers and will always choose the open source free version. It's a personality thing of that user. It's not because that alternative is better. Some will choose the best product regardless if it has a price or what it is. That's also a personality thing. Then the majority probably look at the ratio of performance and value and cost.

I'm not sure a developer gives two sh|ts about the freeware crowd. I wouldn't care.

I've been in sales my whole life. I own my own business. I learned long ago there is no good that can come from the bottom feeding mercenary customers. If the customers desire to not allow you to make any $ is greater than your desire to make $ then its a losing battle. Your better off going after the other 85% of the population that will be more reasonable.

I think majority of server builders or NAS customers are willing to pay a competitive and reasonable price for a superior product.

That's really all that matters.

I don't hate on the developer because he has high level of talent. Even if arrogant because of it that's just another reason to consider IMO.

Personally I'd rather buy a superior product designed by the most talented software engineer than settle for something less.

I'm not saying that is what NZFS is yet. That will have to be decided and proven to me. If it is... I'll probably buy it.

So much hate going on in this thread but if you peel it all away everything I just said is all that matters. The developer knows that.

I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying the developer needs to put his money where his mouth is. The market will determine the fate of the product.

I also think he's promoting an advanced product to the wrong crowd. Most of us use servers for distributing media and not for archiving and backing up important data. If a drive fails and you lose a few movies it's not that big of a deal because they can generally be replaced fairly easy. UnRAID and FlexRAID are well suited to the task so the added benefits he's promoting are really of little importance to a lot of us. Frankly, after the bad experience I had with trying to convert from unRAID to FlexRAID, I'd be hard pressed to want to go through that again with another software RAID solution. The fact that he was also behind FlexRAID just puts me off the product a bit more. In fact, after restoring my unRAID setup I upgraded to version 5.0-rc and I couldn't be happier. I would only consider giving NZFS a try if the cost to upgrade from FlexRAID is minimal. I'd probably wait a while to make sure the bugs are fixed before giving it a shot.
Edited by captain_video - 2/14/13 at 10:05am

But isn't the issues you had limits if unraid product?

With Flexraid I can shut it down and the drives are fully readable in any machine with the data on them.

Your blaming Flexraid for an unraid limitation

I don't think anyone hates the developer because he has a high level of talent... or because he's so ambitious and wants to eat all the big fish in the storage world...

The method of approach is simply amateur-ish...

It is one of the few rare times I see anyone trying to market a non-existent product and already claiming superiority over an exist and popular product...

Being a brilliant developer doesn't make you a good sales man, if you see what I mean... The thinking is quite binary, (which is quite normal as developer) but in the sales world, there are no binary circumstances...

In most circumstances this feature is kind of pointless. The only advantage for data integrity that I see for Flexraid or NZFS is the multi-parity support and only if you have a lot of drives. Writes to Flexraid and NZFS are supposed to be faster, reads are the same.

Not worth the upgrade price to me. If it was free it might be worth the work to move over.

In reality all the advantages are minor and as far as protecting your data the differences are negligible. Unraid is a great product. People report Flexraid is a great product(I believe it). I don't see a good reason to pay more for nzfs.

I never could discern exactly what the issue was with my upgrade. As such, I'm not specifically placing the blame on FlexRAID, but my reluctancy to use it are based on my experience. Here's an outline of what transpired:

I installed a hard drive for the OS, installed Windows 7, and then installed FlexRAID, all with just the OS drive connected and nothing else. I then shut down the server, disconnected the OS drive, reinstalled the USB flash drive, reconnected all of the unRAID drives, and reconfigured it so that it would boot back up from the unRAID USB drive. I then transferred data from the 1st data drive in unRAID to a newly formatted NTFS drive on another PC across my network. Once the data transfer was complete, I'd swap out the data drives in the server, disconnect all of the unRAID drives, and reconfigure it to boot in FlexRAID. Once it booted up I would add the new drive to the array and then shut everything down.

I reconnected the unRAID drives, disconnected the NTFS drive(s), and reconfigured the server to boot back into unRAID. I then took the old unRAID drive with the reiserfs file system and reformatted it on the Windows PC with an NTFS partition. I was careful not to mix drives with different formats in either array configuration. I repeated this entire process one drive at a time until I ran into problems. I would always delete the configuration file on the unRAID flash drive and then reboot the array so unRAID would see everything as a new array and allow me to start the array with no error messages about missing drives. I just wouldn't initiate a parity check after starting the array.

I have two Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-port SATA controllers installed in the server. The motherboard has six SATA ports, IIRC. I only used 4 of the 6 ports on the motherboard for drives in the array and the rest were connected to the SATA controller cards. Everything went fine and the server booted into FlexRAID until I had installed about half the drives (I had 20 total drives in the array at that time, IIRC). This would include the OS drive, the four drives connected to the motherboard, and 8 drives connected to the first SATA controller. I forget if I was ever actually able to connect all 8 drives to the controller of if I was able to go beyond that and start on the 2nd controller. Whatever the case, the server would simply hang while attempting to initialize the drives on the controllers following the POST screen. I simply could not get it to boot into Windows to get to FlexRAID. I replaced the Windows 7 OS with a copy of Windows Home Server and the same scenario repeated itself. I reinstalled the OS several times with no better results. The PC would hang after a certain point and not allow me to get into Windows or WHS. The OS had not even begun loading yet as it was still going through the initial POST and drive initialization stage.

This is what became so perplexing to me because there was no rational reason for this to happen. Aside from the newly added OS drive, all other drives had been connected to the array previously except the OS drive, albeit in different slots of the array. When I restored everything back to the way it was, I had absolutely no problems booting from the unRAID USB drive with all 20 drives attached. The drive I had been using for the OS was a Crucial 64GB SSD that has been used on numerous PCs both before and after the server upgrade attempt with no problems whatsoever. I tried swapping out hardware and cables wherever I could, but the results were the same. The server configured for FlexRAID simply refused to boot after a certain number of drives were added. I installed the very latest Windows 7/Vista drivers available for all hardware.

I disagree.

The feature is important to me. Flexraid offers that.

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:27pm

I like being able to pull out a drive from my hot swap Norco 4220 and slapping that drive in my Cosmos II desktop case (also has hot swaps) and just reading the drive...

I sometimes fill up a 3TB drive full of bluray rips and then add it to the pool. Versus adding a blank drive and then copying the data over LAN at a much slower speed.

Flexraid reads all your drive to intialize.. so if I add another it doesn't add to the time it take to initialize unless that drive is slower than all the others.


It's always done in the morning even with 20TB+

It's good everything is working for you now, but your issue was a little perplexing. Since all your HDDs sound like sata drives, I wouldn't have recommended booting with all drives connected. For some odd reason, Windows is much more reliable at initializing a disk that is connected while it's running. The following method would have worked better

• Boot W7 from SSD with all "empty" HDDs sata (data) cables unplugged but sata (power) cables connected
• Connect 1 data cable at a time, and follow the dialog boxes explaining where to mount (assign drive letter or empty ntfs folder
• After all disks are initialized and mounted, start the flexraid service and create your config

You are going to kill Unraid then try to to compete with NetApp? Those two products aren't even in the same universe but I wish you the best of luck.

captain_video they weren't wd red drives were they?

You are an odd one Mr. Gri... Mfusick! I hope you realize that very few people would ever feel a need to do this.

125MBps vs 100MBps

I'm glad you found a good use for it man but for most people it is a useless feature.

Please speak for yourself.

Agreed.

Unlike hardware raid (or even some software raid options) if the motherboard, CPU, PSU, one hard drive, etc craps out on me I like to know that I can immediately access my data if needed using another windows machine.

actually, Windows/ Linux out of the box and osx with third party

I think he was referring to the potential through put increase though

Thus the "immediately" part of my statement.

There are tools to access reiserfs on Windows, so that isn't a real problem. Writing is more difficult(if possible) but reading isn't that hard.

All of these have the same basic features:

parity protection
drive pooling
stable environment

If you disagree, so be it. I'll stop posting now.

I don't want to use reiserfs. I want to be able to easily access the data.

Again, that's why I specifically chose the word "immediately"

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:27pm

No offense but who wants to do that?

Linux is still used by the vast minority.

All options here have their pros and cons but the whole Linux/reiserf thing is a major con to many. FlexRaid certainly isn't perfect either, fwiw, but saying this isn't a big deal isn't accurate to everyone.

If you've been in sales your whole life, you should know that it is far better to tout the benefits of your product vs another, than it is to put down another product in order to put yours up. Though they achieve the same thing (pros vs. cons of each product), the first way gives the customer additional food for thought, the second way has the potential to insult the customer.