RAID
RAID can increase performance in certain applications. RAID levels 0, 5 and 6 all use striping. This allows multiple spindles to increase transfer rates for linear transfers. Workstation-type applications often work with large files. They greatly  benefit from disk striping. Examples for such applications are those using video or audio files. This throughput is also useful in disk-to-disk backups. RAID 1 as well as other striping-based RAID levels can improve the performance for access patterns with many simultaneous random accesses, like those used by a multi-user database.