RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks | Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drives, Hard drives, or Solid State Drive, into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.

RAID configurations employ techniques such as striping, mirroring, and parity to create large reliable data stores. There are many RAID configurations such as RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 2, RAID 3, RAID 4, RAID 5, RAID 6, etc. and some nested RAID configurations such as RAID 10, RAID 01, RAID 50, RAID 60, RAID 100, etc.

While most RAID levels can provide good protection against and recovery from hardware defects or defective sectors/read errors (hard errors), they do not provide any protection against data loss due to physical damage or soft errors such as user error, or software malfunction, or malware infection. For valuable data, RAID is only one building block of a larger data loss prevention and recovery scheme. It cannot replace a backup plan.