Computer Storage Jargon Buster by myBoomBox Confused by all the technical jargon? Looking for straightforward explainations of what RAID or NAS really means? Let our glossary of useful computer storage terminology help you learn what you need to know. If there is anything you think is missing or something you would like explained in more detail please Contact the myBoomBox Team and we will be more than happy to help.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) - a device containing storage (normally hard drive based) that shares the information stored across a computer network. Typically a NAS box will be used to share electronic documents and files to computers on the network, but more often these devices are being used to stream music, video and picture data to Network Media Players.

RAID - stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or sometimes Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Generally RAID is the software inside a hard drive storage system (e.g. a NAS) that provides protection against drive failures, increases capacity by grouping drives together into logical sets and often increases performance. RAID technology achieves this by various methods, often called RAID levels. Example RAID levels are RAID level 1 (mirroring) and RAID level 5 (striping data across multiple disks and storing parity information). See the following defintion of the major RAID levels:

• RAID 0 - stripe data across a number of hard drives for improved performance.
• RAID 1 - mirror data across two hard drives to protect against drive failure.
• RAID 0/1 - stripe and mirror data providing increased performance and protection against loss of data.
  
• RAID 5 - a combination of striping (for performance) and storing parity information (for data protection). This method is more efficient with storage space than mirroring, i.e. with RAID 5 you don't lose half the space for a complete mirror image of the primary disk as you do with RAID 1.