In a RAID, multiple drives (HDD, SSD, or NVMe) are combined into an array. This provides higher performance or redundancy than a single drive can offer. This array appears to your system as one logical storage unit.

RAID supports various configurations, including levels 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, and linear. RAID uses techniques such as disk striping and disk mirroring. It also uses disk striping with parity in RAID Levels 4, 5, and 6. These help to achieve redundancy, lower latency, increased bandwidth, and maximized ability to recover from hard disk crashes.

RAID distributes data across each device in the array by breaking it into consistently sized chunks. These chunks are commonly 256 KB or 512 KB, though other sizes are also possible.

It writes these chunks to a hard drive in the RAID array according to the RAID level employed. While reading the data, the process is reversed. This gives the illusion that the multiple devices in the array are actually one large drive.

RAID technology is beneficial for those who manage large amounts of data. The following are the primary reasons to deploy RAID:

• It enhances speed
• It increases storage capacity using a single virtual disk
• It minimizes data loss from disk failure
• The RAID layout and level online conversion