Anybody ever tried FlexRaid?

I would like to build a homemade NAS, but I'm still in doubt how I would do that.

On one side, there's ZFS. To use this, I would use fine free programs like FreeNAS, NAS4Free (basically the continued development of FreeNAS 7 after it was sold by the original author) and ZFSGuru. The only thing holding me back here is that ZFS uses a relative big amount of disk space for parity and that it needs a LOT of memory if you want to use the more advanced features like deduplication (about 4GB/RAM per 1TB of storage)

On the other side there's unRAID. UnRAID has been there for a few years now, but it seems development is rather slow. On the other hand, it seems to be pretty stable and has a very active user base. One very big plus I think is that it was withstand the loss of one disk without loosing data, but should more than one disk fail, you still only loose the data on those failed disks: the data on the other disks can still be read by installing the disks into a different pc.

So I thought I would go for an unRAID system. It seems the best option there was for home users. The downside is: it costs if you want to use it with more than 3 disks (or want to use a cache disk to speed things up): $69 for use with up to 6 disks and $119 for use with a maximum of 21 disks.

But today I stumbled onto the page of SnapRAID. Though SnapRAID didn't seem for me because it's uses CLI, and is still pretty young, it did draw my attention to another product: FlexRaid. Now, this does look interesting! It's a system that can be used on both Windows and Linux. It offers both drive pooling and Parity Data Protection. It allows you to add drives later to the pool to expand it. These drives don't even need to be empty or formatted! Should it fail, you can recover the loss of up to 3 drives! AND you can still read the data on the disks if you pull the from the array and plug them into another computer. It's also not free (anymore), but it costs less than unRAID.

About the only thing I don't really like about it, is that it is only a Raid system and not a real NAS. The way I understand it , you can just as well install this onto your desktop PC. But I really would like a NAS to put things centralised on the network. On the other hand, I think this could be solved because it can be installed with OpenMediaVault as well. (this is the next project from the original FreeNAS author).

This FlexRAID thing seems incredibly eh... flexible smile More so that anything I've ever seen. Has anybody here ever used it?
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