ARCHIVED: What is a RAID?

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RAID stands for "redundant array of independent disks" (originally "redundant array of inexpensive disks"). It refers to technology that coordinates multiple disks to behave as a single unit. Most RAID implementations accomplish this through a technique called striping. A stripe is a disk segment varying in size from one sector (usually 512 bytes) up to several megabytes. The stripes of the independent disks are re-ordered to distribute disk usage across all of them.

Because all the disks can read and write simultaneously, a RAID is potentially much faster than a single hard drive. On the other hand, because it has so many components, a RAID is more prone to disk failure. For this reason, most RAID implementations store parity information to reconstruct lost data in the event of a crash.

For more information, see:

  http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

Advanced Computer & Network Corporation offers an excellent overview of RAID at:

  http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

This is document aewi in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2023-09-22 16:50:23.