Glossary: RAID

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. When the popularity of the PC led to more affordable disk drives, people began to consider advantages they could reap by putting more than one drive in the same computer. The main possible motives to combine disks were: speed (splitting a file across two disks lets I/O take place in parallel), redundancy (writing the same file to more than one disk means it can survive a disk failure), and capacity (making several disks look like a single bigger disk).

Although some ideas behind RAID had been around for years, the term was coined and the craze was kicked off by a paper titled "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)" published in 1988. Although RAID techniques originally became popular in server machines that serve multiple users, they have only become more mainstream over time, with even hardcore PC users turning to RAID for perceived advantages in speed or safety. By 2006, PC motherboard manufacturers were commonly offering hardware support for RAID, effectively making RAID a less expensive option for the common PC user.

See Also:

• A look at whether or not it makes sense to use RAID for disk mirroring in your home Windows PC.