RAID is an acronym first defined by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson and Randy Katz at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 to describe a redundant array of inexpensive disks,^[1] a technology that allowed computer users to achieve high levels of storage reliability from low-cost and less reliable PC-class disk-drive components, via the technique of arranging the devices into arrays for redundancy.

More recently, marketers representing industry RAID manufacturers reinvented the term to describe a redundant array of independent disks as a means of disassociating a "low cost" expectation from RAID technology.^[2]

"RAID" is now used as an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives. The different schemes/architectures are named by the word RAID followed by a number, as in RAID 0, RAID 1, etc. RAID's various designs involve two key design goals: increased data reliability or increased input/output performance. When multiple physical disks are set up to use RAID technology, they are said to be in a RAID array. This array distributes data across multiple disks, but the array is seen by the computer user and operating system as one single disk. RAID can be set up to serve several different purposes.

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