Unraid is an operating system that brings enterprise-class features for personal and small business applications. Configure your computer systems to maximize performance and capacity using any combination of OS, storage devices, and hardware.
Unraid has come out with their new pricing plan.
I have mistakenly said in some comments here before that they were doing away with their lifetime plan. They still have it, but it is just more expensive. They have introduced a couple of cheaper annual subscription plans.
If anyone is still on the fence about buying Unraid, you have a week until the new pricing plan comes into affect.
After seeing so many examples of companies really screwing up their pricing changes, it is refreshing to see Unraid do this so well.
TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) keeps getting better, for free. It does most of the same tricks that the big boy appliances do, but with your commodity hardware, at no cost.
And it does all this exceedingly well. AND if you want.. you can buy support. At your discretion.
I don’t have half the world’s RAM to give to ZFS on my budget NAS tho, and Unraid allows mismatched drive sizes, which is pretty attractive to budget users. TrueNAS is definitely great though.
There are cheap NASes/home servers to be bought/built for a couple hundred bucks, with very limited RAM, while TrueNAS recommends 8GB minimum. It’s also often much cheaper to have the option to buy mismatched drives on sale and expand your storage over time, than having to buy matched drives, and having to plan long term for potential expansion of else have to replace a whole set of drives at once if you need more. But fair enough, yes.
I was considering grabbing a last minute legacy license, but I really don't have a use case for unraid. I need a NAS for storage and a few VMs. And my apps run on generic SBCs or NUCs which I manage through ssh/ansible. So yeah, TrueNAS it is for me as well.