RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks." Often
"Inexpensive" is replaced with "Independant," but really
it is supposed to be inexpensive. If you think about it, "independent"
doesn't really make sense, since there is no other kind of hard disk. The
term was first coined by researchers at the University of California at
Berkeley, who first investigated the use of multiple-drive arrays in 1987.
The basic principle behind RAID is the use of multiple hard disk drives
in an array that looks, feels, and behaves like a single large, fast hard
drive. There are a number of ways that this can be done, but in every case
the end goal is to exceed the capacity, data security, or performance of
the drives that make up the system, to one extent or another. But when RAIDs
fail, they fail big time, sometimes costing as much to recover as the RAID
itself. Recovery success, however, is much better so long as clones are
made prior to recovery attempts. [Back to RAID Recovery]
