Computer Concepts Module 10 Practice Exam

RAID is a way to arrange multiple hard drives to work together so you get better reliability and/or faster performance. It’s a set of disk configurations designed to provide redundancy (so you don’t lose data if a drive fails) and/or enhanced speed. For example, mirroring copies the same data onto two drives, so if one drive fails you can still access everything from the other. Stripping spreads data across multiple drives to boost throughput, increasing read/write speed but typically with less redundancy. Parity-based levels place extra information across drives to allow rebuilding data if a drive fails, balancing capacity, fault tolerance, and performance. Different RAID levels trade off usable capacity, protection against failure, and speed, depending on what you need. RAID can be implemented in hardware with a controller or in software by the operating system. It is not encryption, a networking protocol, or a database indexing method.