This course will provide an overview of how to buy, setup, and install Unraid for your personal media server.

Why Unraid?

Unraid Keeps Your Data Safe

• In Unraid if one of your disks had to die, you could plug in another drive, and it will rebuild the data that was on that drive. However, if you were to lose more than one drive, you could still plug the remaining drives into a computer to retrieve what’s there.

Unraid Is Efficient

• Unraid may not be as fast as traditional RAID, but it’s far more efficient. There is a huge reduction in power consumption because all the drives aren’t spinning to read and write data.
• Unraid is also efficient in how you can expand the size of the array. You can add a drive of any size, and it will increase the size of the array by that size, even if it doesn’t match the size of the other disks. As long as you make sure that your parity drive is equal to or larger than the biggest drive in your array, your data will be safe.
• Unraid’s base configuration requires only 2GB of RAM and a 1GHz processor. At idle, barely any RAM or CPU are used. 

Excellent Application Support

• Having Docker support also means you’re not locked into any proprietary applications.
• You’re able to turn your NAS into a powerful media server, private cloud-based storage, or file sharing downloader with just a few clicks

Your Hardware, Your Budget

• One of the most significant advantages with Unraid is that it runs on regular PC hardware. This means that there’s no limit to how powerful you’d like to make your build as long as you’ve got the budget to match. If you require a NAS without virtualization or resource intensive apps, you may even be able to repurpose an older computer that you own.
• Off the shelf NAS systems like QNAP and Synology can be difficult to upgrade or source replacement parts for. This is another advantage of using regular PC parts, as they’re more widely available.