The Raid Museum Photograph Collection
Founder Ted Goodlander began product development in 1984 and from 1984 to 1990, developed and later abandoned products at RAID levels 3,4,5 and 6. He believed that because these early RAID products had fundamental architectural performance problems on the four basic disk metrics (small reads, small writes, large reads, and large writes), they were not very "saleable" in large commercial quantities. The first product to achieve management's goal of a fault tolerant storage subsystem with performance equal to or exceeding a single disk on a sustained basis was the RAID 7 architecture completed in late 1990. In March 1992, the first RAID 7 beta units were shipped. The first RAID 7 export was then shipped in May 1992.