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RAID is the short from of Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is the process of combining multiple inexpensive disk drives into an array of disk drives to obtain performance, capacity and reliability that exceeds that of a single large drive. It is the same as striping, which is the method of combining multiple drives into one logical storage unit. Striping partitions the storage space of each drive into stripes, which can be as small as one sector (512 bytes) or as large as several megabytes.
MTBF
The array of drives appears to the host computer as a single logical drive. Here the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of the array is equal to the MTBF of an individual drive, divided by the number of drives in the array
Because of this, the MTBF of a non-redundant array (RAID 0) is too low for mission-critical systems. However, disk arrays can be made fault-tolerant by redundantly storing information in various ways.
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