Computer Hardware Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) is a type of disk drives with two or more drives in combination for increasing data integrity, fault tolerance, throughput or capacity and performance. RAID provides seceral methods of writing data across/to multiple disks at once. RAID is one of many ways to combine multiple hard drives into one single logical unit. Thus, instead of seeing several different hard drives, the operating system sees only one. RAID is typically used on server computers, and is usually implemented with identically-sized disk drives. With decreases in hard drive prices and wider availability of RAID options built into motherboard chipsets, RAID is also being found and offered as an option in higher-end end user computers, especially computers dedicated to storage-intensive tasks, such as video and audio editing.

Related Terms

RAID: Redundant array of independent disks