WHAT IS RAID, Why do we need it?

The term RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” often referred to as “RAID Array” as spoken commonly in the trade. RAID was created back when hard drives were expensive, so it created an option to increase capacity by using multiple inexpensive disks populated into a single server. It also was created / invented to facilitate ‘Redundancy’, which is also known as “fault tolerance”. It means that the ‘Array’ created, and all of its critical data, remains in tact and unharmed should there be a disk failure. So data is then completely usable whenever there is a disk failure. On top of this, there is something called a ‘1 disk or 2 disk redundancy, which means the number of disks that may fail in the array, while the array remains intact. This level of Redundancy in a RAID configuration became very important to any company using this technique, as disk drive errors and failures were common, today there is an argument that the disks these days, don’t tend to fail as often as they used to. Mostly due to the fact that companies like Seagate, HP and Dell have innovated and designed different ways of manufacturing scsi and sas disk drives. RAID itself, offers a fail safe, for want of a better word, against hardware failure, rather than other means of disasters with servers, such as , theft, natural occurrences and malware.