What is Unraid?

Unraid is an embedded operating system that is designed to provide you with the ultimate control over your hardware. In addition to performing the duties of a robust network-attached storage (NAS) system, Unraid can also act as an application server and virtual machine (VM) host.

Unraid installs to and boots from, a USB flash device, and loads into a root RAM file system. By using a modern Linux kernel with up-to-date hardware drivers, Unraid can operate on almost any 64-bit system (x86_64) with a minimal memory footprint. All configuration data related to the operating system is stored on the flash device and loaded at the same time as the operating system itself.

Management of your Unraid system is accomplished through an intuitive web interface that offers basic controls for common tasks as well as advanced tuning options for the more savvy user. Unraid automatically chooses default settings that should work for most people's needs, but also allows you to tweak settings to your liking. This makes Unraid intuitive where you want it, and tunable where you need it. By combining the benefits of both hardware and software agnosticism into a single OS, Unraid provides a wide variety of ways to store, protect, serve, and play the content you download or create.

The capabilities of Unraid are separated into three core areas:

• A software-defined NAS - the ability to share storage capacity, over a network.
• An application server - the built-in ability to act as an application server and run containerized applications.
• Hardware virtualization - the ability to run virtual machines with near bare-metal performance.