RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) is a method of combining several disks to form one larger virtual disk. Depending on the configuration, this virtual drive can provide increased data safety and/or increased performance. Linux provides a software implementation of RAID that is cheaper (free!) than costly hardware RAID, and is usually much faster! Unfortunately it has suffered from poor documentation and much FUD.
We will go over
1) RAID basics;
2) Setup and configuration of a disk mirror (RAID 1);
3) Benchmarking of the RAID disk;
4) recovering from a disk failure.
If we have time, we will go over examples of other RAID levels.