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I'm sure there are reasons for using Unraid but the original funky raid alternative they marketed has always struck me as extremely fishy. The kind of solution developed by folks who didn't know enough about the best practices in storage and decided to roll their own. I guess people like web interfaces too. Personally I'd never use it. Get Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS, learn some Docker, Ansible and Prometheus, deploy and never touch until you break it or the hardware breaks. Throw Webmin on it if you like dancing bears too.
Unraid can use randomly sized disks, and allows expansion of an array by adding more disks. Something that traditional RAID doesn't do.
It's more like Synology but on your own hardware, much more user friendly for people that don't have the experience (or time) to set it up the hard way.
MergerFS
Not sure how traditional-traditional (hw RAID?) you're referring to but you can use different disk sizes as well as grow LVM/mdraid or ZFS. It does indeed require a bit more thought and reading to do well. On the upside it's probably much safer (for data integrity) and more performant.
As I remember ZFS did recently just add the ability to grow an array, but it's not seamless and wastes space because of some limitations with it. You also need to learn the CLI procedures to do it without breaking something, vs just clicking a button on a webUI.
ZFS also recently had a major data loss bug so I'm not sure safer is accurate.
I do use ZFS on my servers, I'm not actually an unraid user myself. But managing ZFS is not easy and takes a lot of time to learn.
You're right, raidz expansion is brand new and I probably wouldn't use it for a few years. I was referring to adding new redundant vdevs to an existing pool which has always been supported as far as I know. E.g. if you have an existing raidz or mirror, you can add another raidz or mirror vdev to the pool. The pool size grows with the usable size of the new vdev. It's just
zpool add thepool mirror disk1 disk2as far as I know. The downside being it results in less usable space - e.g. two raidz1 vdevs remove 2 disks from the usable space, whereas Unraid-raid would remove 1. For example if you have 3x 3TB and 3x 4TB disks, you'd end up with 14TB usable space with ZFS and 17TB with Unraid. On the flip side, the two raidz1 vdevs would have higher reliability since you can have one disk die in each vdev.No question. I think TrueNAS offers this too.
Imagine how many of those would be found in Unraid-raid if it was used as widely and for similar loads as ZFS. My argument isn't that there aren't bugs in storage systems. There are, and the more eyes have seen the code and the more users have lost data for more years, the fewer bugs would remain. Assuming similar competence of the system developers, ZFS being much older and ran for production loads makes it more likely to contain fewer data eating bugs than Unraid.