What is a primary benefit of RAID technology?

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology is primarily designed to enhance data storage reliability and performance. One of the key benefits of implementing RAID is the improvement in overall performance and storage capacity. This is achieved through various RAID levels that offer different configurations and techniques for reading and writing data across multiple disks.

For instance, certain RAID levels, such as RAID 0, distribute the data evenly across multiple drives, allowing for faster read and write speeds. Other levels, such as RAID 1, improve data redundancy and reliability by mirroring the data on multiple drives, ensuring that if one drive fails, the data remains accessible from another. This combination of speed and capacity optimization contributes to enhanced performance in data-intensive applications, making RAID a vital solution for organizations that require robust storage options.

In contrast, increased energy consumption is generally a side effect of using multiple drives in a RAID configuration, while reduction in disk size is not a benefit of RAID, as it typically requires multiple drives. Although RAID can help in simplifying some aspects of storage management, it often introduces its own complexities depending on the configuration and level used. Therefore, the correct answer highlights the crucial advantage of performance improvement and increased storage capacity that RAID technology brings to data storage systems.