I need a solution to store and transmit data, and these are the things I'm looking for:
-The ability to store data on hard drives while having the drives have their own independent filesystems and 1 or 2 drives for parity, which would allow for 1 drive to fail, recover data, 2 drives to fail, only those two drives' data would be lost.
*Both unRAID and FlexRAID do this, good! FlexRAID has support for more than 1 drive for parity, though.
-The ability to pool the resultant mass of drives into (ideally) one visible disk, or in less optimal cases, one folder.
*FlexRAID would be better for this as its main idea is to pool drives into one visible disk, whereas unRAID could work by creating a folder made up of all disks that would be shared on the network via Samba. I think FlexRAID has the advantage here.
-The ability to write parity information and update it in real time
*According to SnapRAID's comparison page, unRAID does this natively, and from what I can gather, FlexRAID originally had scheduled parity updates but now supports realtime parity updates (although some posts I found from 2011 state it's buggy - is that still true?). If Flexraid supports realtime parity updates, I think that's another score for it! otherwise, I could probably deal with the scheduled backups.
-Current level of support=
*from the unRAID forums, it seems like people don't expect to see any significant changes anytime soon, which leads me to believe that the project may be on its way out. FlexRAID's creator seems to still support it, but is working on developing NZFS, a new filesystem. No details on that though.
-Max array size
*unRAID supports up to 20 or so data disks, and I couldn't find a stat on FlexRAID's limitations. Interesting
-Methods of file distribution
-unRAID natively supports Samba file sharing, and it seems like not much else. AFP and NFS are supported but buggy, so I'd not like to count those. Anything beyond that is up to the plugins, so let's leave it at that. FlexRAID, on the other hand, runs within Windows, so whatever distro program that is used that can index a hard drive (the flexraid pool) is good to go. That means that I wouldn't need a separate machine to run a web server or an FTP server, and I wouldn't have to worry about transfer methods between the distro server and the file server. I think FlexRAID takes the cake here, again.
-Reliability (in terms of corruption, between restarts, pulling drives and hotswap capabilities)
-unRAID seems to need to be rebooted inbetween insertion of replacement drives and all, and I'm not sure about FlexRAID. maybe some help on FlexRAID's capabilities? Although in terms of running long-term, it seems like unRAID servers can run for months without worry. I've currently got a Windows 7 box that has been running as a torrent server for 60 days without a restart, and it's doing okay. Maybe Windows and FlexRAID is stable enough to do that...hopefully!
Okay, this is all I can think of at the moment. PLEASE PLEASE leave feedback, comments, insults if I got information all wrong (
) and all that jazz. Hopefully this comparison can help people in the future that are deciding between the two! For me, it's really a method of best storing files by:
HAVING DRIVES POOLED TOGETHER WITH PARITY BACKUP, and how to serve those files in multiple formats.
Thanks for reading!
-The ability to store data on hard drives while having the drives have their own independent filesystems and 1 or 2 drives for parity, which would allow for 1 drive to fail, recover data, 2 drives to fail, only those two drives' data would be lost.
*Both unRAID and FlexRAID do this, good! FlexRAID has support for more than 1 drive for parity, though.
-The ability to pool the resultant mass of drives into (ideally) one visible disk, or in less optimal cases, one folder.
*FlexRAID would be better for this as its main idea is to pool drives into one visible disk, whereas unRAID could work by creating a folder made up of all disks that would be shared on the network via Samba. I think FlexRAID has the advantage here.
-The ability to write parity information and update it in real time
*According to SnapRAID's comparison page, unRAID does this natively, and from what I can gather, FlexRAID originally had scheduled parity updates but now supports realtime parity updates (although some posts I found from 2011 state it's buggy - is that still true?). If Flexraid supports realtime parity updates, I think that's another score for it! otherwise, I could probably deal with the scheduled backups.
-Current level of support=
*from the unRAID forums, it seems like people don't expect to see any significant changes anytime soon, which leads me to believe that the project may be on its way out. FlexRAID's creator seems to still support it, but is working on developing NZFS, a new filesystem. No details on that though.
-Max array size
*unRAID supports up to 20 or so data disks, and I couldn't find a stat on FlexRAID's limitations. Interesting
-Methods of file distribution
-unRAID natively supports Samba file sharing, and it seems like not much else. AFP and NFS are supported but buggy, so I'd not like to count those. Anything beyond that is up to the plugins, so let's leave it at that. FlexRAID, on the other hand, runs within Windows, so whatever distro program that is used that can index a hard drive (the flexraid pool) is good to go. That means that I wouldn't need a separate machine to run a web server or an FTP server, and I wouldn't have to worry about transfer methods between the distro server and the file server. I think FlexRAID takes the cake here, again.
-Reliability (in terms of corruption, between restarts, pulling drives and hotswap capabilities)
-unRAID seems to need to be rebooted inbetween insertion of replacement drives and all, and I'm not sure about FlexRAID. maybe some help on FlexRAID's capabilities? Although in terms of running long-term, it seems like unRAID servers can run for months without worry. I've currently got a Windows 7 box that has been running as a torrent server for 60 days without a restart, and it's doing okay. Maybe Windows and FlexRAID is stable enough to do that...hopefully!
Okay, this is all I can think of at the moment. PLEASE PLEASE leave feedback, comments, insults if I got information all wrong (
) and all that jazz. Hopefully this comparison can help people in the future that are deciding between the two! For me, it's really a method of best storing files by:HAVING DRIVES POOLED TOGETHER WITH PARITY BACKUP, and how to serve those files in multiple formats.
Thanks for reading!
