RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) combines multiple disks to improve performance or provide redundancy, managed either through hardware or software. This courselet focuses on Software RAID, guiding users through creating, managing, and benchmarking a RAID 0 array using mdadm on Ubuntu, highlighting both its high performance and lack of redundancy. It concludes with steps to create and mount a filesystem on the array, and then safely dismantling the RAID setup, ensuring users understand the full lifecycle of RAID array management.