RAID, redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) disks, is a system that employs two or more disk drives in combination, through hardware or software, for performance and fault tolerance. RAID has a number of different configurations referred to as levels. The most common RAID levels and their functions are:

Level 0: data striping, no redundancy.

Level 1: disk mirroring.

Level 3: similar to 0 but one specific disk is used to stripe data.

Level 5: low-level data striping across all disks with stripe error correction. For more information, refer to www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html for a thorough discussion on the various RAID levels.

Data striping is the ability to spread disk writes across multiple disks. This alone can result in improved performance as well the ability to create one large volume from multiple disks. For instance, if you had nine 6GB drives, you ordinarily would be forced to create at least nine partitions when configuring your system. This partitioning scheme, however, may not make sense for your situation. If you created a RAID 0 out of the nine drives, it would appear to the system as one 54GB drive, which you could then partition as you saw fit. In this scenario, though, if one disk fails then the entire array would fail.

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