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RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks and is a technology that combines multiple physical disk drives into one or more logical units. Its primary purposes are to improve data security and performance by splitting or replicating data across drives. Some RAID configurations, like RAID 1, offer fault tolerance by mirroring data, while others, like RAID 0, increase speed by striping data across drives but without any redundancy.

Key concepts

Striping: Data is broken into blocks and written across multiple drives simultaneously, increasing read and write speeds. This offers no data redundancy, so if a single drive fails, all data is lost.

Mirroring: Data is written identically to two or more drives. This provides high fault tolerance, as the system can continue to operate if one drive fails. Read performance can improve as data is read from multiple drives, but write performance is limited by a single drive's speed.

Parity: A calculated checksum is created for a block of data and written to one of the drives. This allows data to be reconstructed if a single drive fails, providing a balance between performance and redundancy.