RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) systems allow for combining multiple physical disks into a single logical disk for the purposes of data redundancy, performance, and reliability. There are several RAID levels that offer different tradeoffs between these factors. RAID level 5 stripes both data and parity information across all disks, allowing writes to occur in parallel for improved performance compared to RAID level 4 which dedicates one disk solely to parity data. RAID level 1 mirrors all data onto a second disk for full data redundancy but at double the storage cost.
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