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RAID is short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks,a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination to ensure that data is stored safely. Previously, because of the higher costs of RAID-compatible hard drives, RAID was used almost exclusively in high end computers and in enterprise computing environments; but with lower cost alternatives and with user-friendly management systems such as Infrant’s RAIDiator2 RAID has become the option of choice for small business and home storage.
RAID levels describe differing configurations that balance performance and security:
RAID 0: This type spreads parts of a file across multiple drives (called data stripping). This is used to increase performance, but if one drive fails, the data in the array is lost.
RAID 1: In this type data is written to two drives simultaneously (known as data mirroring). With RAID level 1, when one disk fails, data access continues on the unaffected disk.
RAID 5: This is perhaps the most popular type of RAID array. This type features the stripping of of RAID 0, as well as error correction. With 3 or more disks RAID 5 provides a balance of performance and capacity while retaining protection from a disk failure.
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