Inside Unraid

The Origins of Unraid

"Just a little side project for beer money..."

Unraid was created like many software solutions—by a software engineer who was trying to solve his own problem. 

In the early 2000’s, the challenge was how to store, access, and have reliable backup for significant amounts of media. At the time, RAID technology was available, but it came with a lot of restrictions that were untenable for consumers: 

1. RAID arrays had to contain disks that were all of the same size, speed, brand, and protocol, rendering them very inflexible.
2. RAID arrays didn’t allow you to expand by adding more disks. You had to build an entirely new server with more storage capacity than the original, and then bulk copy all of your data to the new system.
3. While parity provided protection against disk failures, if more disks failed than parity would protect, you lost the data from the entire array—even the disks that hadn’t failed.

Tom's goal was to solve these issues.

Addressing New Challenges

Nearly two decades and a few grandkids after his journey began, Tom and his growing team set out to solve a new set of challenges that were plaguing folks using desktop PCs:

1. Desktops tend to lack internal storage redundancy, making them susceptible to unrecoverable failures.
2. Desktops are susceptible to viruses and malware. Restoring from these issues can be incredibly time-consuming and arduous.
3. Having both a desktop and a storage/media server means higher costs, more space, increased power consumption, and excessive heat/noise generation.
4. Each time a new desktop OS is released, you have to choose between remaining on your working system or upgrading to the unknown.
5. Supporting multiple operating systems on a single computer can be confusing and costly.

We realized that we could solve these problems by bringing the power of enterprise virtualization technology to consumers. By building in enhanced support, you can easily add multiple full desktop operating systems to your server, and interact with them using locally attached displays and peripherals. Virtualization adds simple system backups and restoration capability, along with the ability to run multiple versions of an OS at the same time.

Unraid Today

What started out as a personal quest to improve media storage has evolved into the most popular at-home storage and computing solution: Unraid OS.

Our powerful operating system allows sophisticated media aficionados, gamers, and other intensive data-users to have ultimate control over their data, media, applications, and desktops. Best of all, Unraid allows you to use just about any combination of hardware that you wish, giving you the freedom to customize and maximize your systems to precisely fit your needs.

With headquarters in San Diego, California, Unraid OS is developed by Lime Technology, Inc.