WHAT IS RAID?
Using Multiple Hard Drives for Performance and Reliability Introduction Back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, computer information servers were encountering a dramatic increase in the amount of data they needed to serve and store. Storage technologies were getting very expensive to place a large number of high capacity hard drives in the servers. A solution was needed and thus RAID was born. So what exactly is RAID? First of all, the acronym stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It was a system developed whereby a large number of low cost hard drives could be linked together to form a single large capacity storage device that offered superior performance, storage capacity and reliability over older storage solutions. It has been widely used and deployed method for storage in the enterprise and server markets, but over the past 5 years has become much more common in end user systems. Advantages of RAID There are three primary reasons that RAID was imp...