Scott Klarr Jr

Dec 11, 2007 How RAID-5 really works

RAID is an acronym for "Redundant Array of Independent Drives," or "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives." The main concept of RAID is the ability to take multiple drives and have them virtualised as a single drive. There are many different RAID structures, all of them obtain one of two primary purposes: aggregated storage space or data redundancy (as in, protection against data loss in the even of hard drive failure). I'm not going into the details of all the RAID levels as this post is more geared towards the lower level workings of RAID-5. If you wish to learn about all the RAID levels, see this Wikipedia Article On RAID.