[geeks] RAID

[nate at portents.com]

The quotes below that answer your questions I'm getting from the following
article, which summarized an interview with David A. Patterson, who led
the team at the UC Berkeley that developed RAID:

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/66909/story_far_raid?fp=16&fpid=0

> Speaking of big iron, when did RAID become Redundant Array of
> INDEPENDENT Disks?

"One of the surprises about RAID was it was so expensive. The I in the
name when we coined the term was for inexpensive disks. But the system was
so expensive, that was kind of awkward for marketing people. So Randy
[Katz (one of Patterson's colleagues at Berkeley)] blessed the change to
independent for I. Since the RAID boxes weren't cheap, that was probably a
better name."

> I saw this on a Dell tech certification test a
> while ago, and it's been bugging me for a while. Didn't it start out
> as Inexpensive, in comparison to mainframe DASD, the place where RAID
> started?

It looks like RAID and DASD were created independently:

"We didn't know IBM had its own RAID 5 set of ideas in the AS/400 line.
IBM had completely independently done the same RAID part of the ideas but
used large disks."

- Nate