RAID: A Personal Recollection of How Storage Became a System
Randy Howard Katz · IEEE Annals of the History of Computing · 2010
Randy H. Katz, David Patterson, and Garth Gibson first defined the acronym RAID, or redundant arrays of inexpensive disks, in a 1987 paper. The RAID idea was that it was feasible to achieve significantly higher levels of storage reliability from possibly very large numbers of lower-cost and lower-reliability smaller disk drives, which were then emerging for personal computers. Today, the National Academy includes RAID among the technologies created by federally funded research in universities that have led to multibillion dollar industries, and software implemented RAID is a standard component of modern operating systems. Here, Katz chronicles his experiences and contributions to RAID's early development.