When designing and implementing a database, you will be faced with a choice of storage implementations and will often choose a level of RAID that supports your system's requirements. Because of this, it is important to understand RAID and the different popular RAID types.

RAID was first introduced through a paper at the University of California at Berkeley in 1987, and the acronym stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. This was an architecture that was designed to decrease the price of disk storage; increase load balancing and concurrence through the striping of drives; and improve availability through redundancy. In the next several tips, we'll examine the most popular RAID architectures: RAID-0, 1, 3, 5, S, 7 and 0+1.