unRAID

What I looked at

I looked at the list below, with my needs in mind.
I didn’t care if it was free, or had a price (to a certain limit), as long as it wasn’t subscription based.

• FreeNAS
• ProxMox
• OpenMediaVault
• unRAID

I’ve had setup FreeNAS one time before, and it was honestly not the best experience to do that.
It was in a virtual environment, but even if it doesn have issues, I encountered now virtual issues, but FreeNAS wasn’t the most fun thing to set up.
I of course did my research and reviews about it, and if you bought a new disk you wanted to add to your pool, you had to do it correctly, or you’d lose your data. And it have happened to a lot of users of FreeNAS, so I discarded it quickly, mainly based on that.
At the time, I had a 4 T TB Seagate Barracuda and a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda, and it used tradional RAID, where you’d have to have the same size of disk for it to be utilized. Which means if I went for RAID 1 (mirror) I’d lose 3 TB of storage.
So the only option for my amount of disks is RAID 0 (striping). Which means if a disk fails, I’m losing the data on both drives.

I did have a look at ProxMox and OpenMediaVault, but not thoroughly.

So I went onto looking at unRAID.
unRAID is based on Arch Linux, if you know Linux, it’s a challenge just to install Arch Linux.
But unRAID made it really easy!
unRAID does have a licens that has a pricetag. Compared to how much a Windows costs, it’s about the same.
You can check the unRAID prices here.