RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives. The purpose of RAID is to increase one or some combination of the following: performance, reliability, and larger data volume sizes. RAID systems distribute data across two or more disks to gain these advantages.

Why do you care? You should care if you are a computer user with large data storage requirements who uses a single hard drive for archiving your files. Obviously if your drive fails you are going to be in a world of hurt. With a RAID system, you set it up once and then don’t think about it again until a drive fails, at which point you won’t lose any data, you just replace the failed drive and move along.

RAID is an umbrella term for a few distinct systems which are identified by number. We will only discuss the RAID configurations that a typical computer user might use to achieve data redundancy and therefore fault tolerance.

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