I'll give this a shot for you Iowa. What is raid, in a simplified explanation: you have 2 hard disks, drive A and drive B. Your data is 100 megabytes in size, in a raid 0 configuration you split half of the data to drive A and the other half to drive B, giving a performance increase. In raid 1 configuration your data is 100 megabytes in size and is written to both drive A and drive B, no performance increase but a safety feature. If either drive fails you have a backup of your data. There is a myriad of configurations one can have for raid setups, and your right; not the normal thing Mr. or Mrs. John Q. Public has to worry about.