In class the other day my professor was speaking of RAID as Redundant
Array of Inexpensive Drives.  As I had remembered the I used to stand
for Inexpensive.  I did a dictionary search at google and found that
it used Independant for the I and stated that it used to mean
Inexpensive.

My question is when (as precisely as possible) did this change in
definition occur.  Was this dictated by a particular standard group or
consortium?  And if avalible was there some rationale as to why the
change took place other than the obvious (RAID isn't inexpensive so it
shouldn't have the word inexpensive in it, what I word fits).

Thank You

poolecl,

Apparently the "I" has always stood for "Inexpensive"; however,
according to the ACRO IT website,
"When the first RAID-based products came out, the cost of controllers
and capacious SCSI disk drives meant that servers could easily cost
$35,000. Vendors were embarrassed by the 'Inexpensive' in the RAID
acronym and temporarily decided that the “I” stood for 'Independent'
instead."
http://www.acro.it/RAID.html

According to the "Introduction of RAID" on CyberHost's website, 
"The acronym RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or now
more commonly known as Independent) Disks...
In 1987, Patterson, Gibson, and Katz of the University of California,
Berkeley, published a paper entitled 'A Case for Redundant Arrays of
Inexpensive Disks (RAID)' [1]... The purpose of RAID was to combine
multiple small, inexpensive disk drives into a single logical drive or
"disk array" that yields performance exceeding that of a more
expensive high speed disk drive."
http://www.cybrhost.com/raid.html

Apparently Patterson, et al's rationalization for using "Inexpensive"
was not that the RAID drives were inexpensive, but that they were so
much LESS expensive than the technology currently being used at the
time.

Likely, this nomenclature did not sit well with corporate IT managers,
who would have been very conscious of their bottom line, not inclined
to consider $35,000+ "inexpensive", and not pleased when the vendors
trying to sell them the components at that kind of price called them
inexpensive. The change from "Inexpensive" to "Independent" would have
taken hold over time, as vendors caught on to the fact that it made
selling to the IT managers a lot less painful.

PCGuide.com's article on "Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks
(RAID)" confirms this story:
"This technique is called Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks or
RAID. ('Inexpensive' is sometimes replaced with 'Independent', but the
former term is the one that was used when the term 'RAID' was first
coined by the researchers at the University of California at Berkeley,
who first investigated the use of multiple-drive arrays in 1987.)"

Now that the cost of the RAID components has dropped to advances in
computer techology, the use of "Inexpensive" may be returning,
according to the "EIDE RAID Tutorial" by Charlie White on Digital
Media Net's website:
"But there is nothing inexpensive about it when you use SCSI or Fibre
Channel drives, so the RAID acronym has now come to mean Redundant
Array of Independant Drives. But ATA drive technology is putting the
Inexpensive back into RAID."
http://www.dtvprofessional.com/2001/08_aug/tutorials/cweide.htm

The text of Patterson, Gibson, and Katz's paper on RAID is here:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/TechRepPages/CSD-87-391


Search Strategy

raid independent inexpensive
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=raid+independent+inexpensive&btnG=Google+Search

raid inexpensive changed to independent 
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=raid+inexpensive+changed+to+independent+&btnG=Google+Search

RAID redundant array of inexpensive (or independent) disks
://www.google.com/search?btnG=+Google+Search+&q=RAID+redundant+array+of+inexpensive+%28or+independent%29+disks


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I hope this Answer has provided just the information you needed!

Regards,

aceresearcher

---

Clarification of Answer by aceresearcher-ga on 01 Nov 2002 10:46 PST

The PCGuide.com URL which was omitted above is here:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index-c.html

---

Clarification of Answer by aceresearcher-ga on 12 Nov 2002 10:38 PST

Hello again poolecl! 
 
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your needs.

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aceresearcher

thank you