RAID is the acronym for “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks,” or “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”. Originally, RAID was developed to consolidate multiple inexpensive hard drives to function as a single unit hard drive with a larger, faster, higher-capacity system network comparable to the more expensive single unit hard drives.

In addition, RAID was intended to assist with redundancy. This process is called failover protection or fault tolerance. The function was to make sure the information and data on the system continue to be usable if and when the drive fails. Many times in this system environment, you might hear the term 1-disk or 2-disk redundancy. This defines the number of drives that can go down and the array of the system operations continues to be viable.

The operation of redundancy is crucial for small businesses. A day without data is devastating to organizations that depend on it and drive failure does occur. One point to note, RAID’s data redundancy does not offer protection against information lost to malware, natural disaster, or theft. Therefore, a good backup system and practice is important for all organizations. RAID will provide a safeguard against lost data due to hardware failure.