A RAID system such as the ones in the CORE and DATA modules of the HIVE, has 2 main advantages :  data-safety There is a certain degree of redundancy (or duplication) of the data on the system, such that if a disk would start malfunctioning or completely stop working, your data would still be fully preserved, until the disk is replaced. faster data-access The multiple hard-drives in the RAID system share the load for the read/write operations. This parallelization allows faster data-access compared to a single disk drive.