RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) uses multiple disk drives to increase performance and availability. It provides parallelism for higher performance and redundancy for data availability. Different RAID levels offer different tradeoffs between performance, availability, and cost. RAID levels include RAID 0 for striping without redundancy, RAID 1 for mirroring, RAID 3 and 5 for striping with parity redundancy.