RAID History

History | RAID implementations | Standard RAID levels | Nested RAID Levels| Proprietary RAID levels | RAID Configurations

Norman Ken Ouchi at IBM was awarded U.S. Patent 4,092,732 titled "System for recovering data stored in failed memory unit" in 1978 and the claims for this patent describe what would later be termed RAID 5 with full stripe writes. This 1978 patent also mentions that disk mirroring or duplexing (what would later be termed RAID 1) and protection with dedicated parity (what would later be termed RAID 4) were prior art at that time.
In 1988, RAID levels 1 through 5 were formally defined by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson and Randy H. Katz in the paper, "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)". This was published in the SIGMOD Conference 1988: pp 109–116. The term "RAID" was first introduced in this paper; it spawned the entire disk array industry.