RAID
When talking about a mirror, this is a very simple idea. Instead of the data being in only one place, there are several copies of the data. These copies usually are on different hard disks (or disk partitions). If there are two copies, one of them can fail without the data being affected (as it still is on the other copy). Mirroring can also give a boost when reading data. It will always be taken from the fastest disk that responds. Writing data is slower though, because all disks need to be updated.