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Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disk (RAID)

Many higher-end systems, especially servers, now employ a new technology called RAID. This system allows for great improvements in both reliability and performance. The idea is to store data on multiple disk drives running in parallel. The primary motivation in most cases is reliability, and for this reason RAID is discussed in detail here. From a performance standpoint, most RAID levels improve performance by allowing multiple accesses to happen simultaneously, and also by using algorithms that reduce seek time and latency by taking advantage of having multiple drives at their disposal. The exact performance impact depends on the level of RAID used; some improve read performance at the expense of write performance, for example.

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