How fast is unRAID?
This is a very hard question to answer, as it depends mostly on your hardware choices, your networking choices, and your configuration choices. unRAID is based on a lean but up-to-date Slackware distribution of Linux, which is ideal for file servers, so it should provide the best possible speed that your hardware is capable of. It does not take advantage of hardware RAID cards, and it does not use RAID striping, and therefore cannot boast the performance gains associated with them. Please see the earlier questions comparing unRAID with other types of RAID. Users and reviewers have generally found a NAS based on unRAID to be significantly faster than many competitive NAS boxes, and to be very similar to the faster NAS implementations that are not based on high performance RAID cards or RAID types. (this needs citations!) Because the emphasis is on data security, through parity protection, writes to parity-protected drives take much longer than reads. Whereas reads are passed through as
