The acronym "RAID" stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is a storage technology that combines multiple hard drives into a single unit to improve performance, reliability, and data redundancy. Various RAID levels provide different balances of performance and fault tolerance, such as RAID 0 (striping for speed) and RAID 1 (mirroring for redundancy). By distributing data across multiple drives, RAID helps protect against data loss due to drive failure and enhances read/write speeds for applications requiring high-performance storage.