So what's unRaid? and what's it used for?

Question: What is unRaid?
Answer: unRaid: is a piece of software that produced by the company Lime-Technology

Question: What does unRaid do?
Answer: unRAID Server is an embedded Network Attached Storage server Operating System designed to boot from a USB Flash device and specifically designed for digital media storage:

• Digital Video
• Digital Music
• Digital Images/Photos

Say what? In plain English please!

Well, let's explain it this way. Years ago, there were no digital cameras, so all pictures were printed out and usually stored away in a box somewhere. Then 20 years later, out comes the box of pictures.

With digital pictures, the actual pictures are rarely printed, and usually stored on a USB stick, an external hard drive, or on your computer's hard drive. Now suppose that hard drive dies, or you lose that USB stick. Some people have tons of pictures stored this way and have no backups at all.

So as a simple form of backup, you could copy all of your pictures to another hard drive. But supposing both hard drives die,....well,..I think you know the answer to that question already.

In the computer world, there's something called RAID. RAID is a method to create a redundant backup of data in case of a hardware failure. There are several types RAID, but we won't go there (at least not in this post). In simplest terms, 3 hard drives are used to copy the data to,..if one of the hard drives fails,..you remove it, put in a replacement, and the data is restored to that drive.

So then how does unRaid fit in?

Well typically standard RAID demands some special hardware that might be out of reach for some people.
unRaid simplifies the requirements, thus making it easier for anyone to use.

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