Google is your friend it will tell you all about it. If you don't handle highly critical files you cannot afford to lose (RAID1), or truly huge files that take forever to load, save, etc. (RAID0 or 5), you don't need it, because it slows down ordinary PCs in ordinary use.
It's where you have multiple hard drives and data writes/reads are split amongst them. There's several flavours of Raid (0, 1, 2....). I don't know them so you'll have to google to get the specifics. One example is that you can have writes split amongst 2 (or more drives) so if you are saving a 10 MB file between 2 drives, 1 MB gets written to drive A, 1 MB to drive B, etc.... until all are written. I think this is Raid 0. This might be faster than writing the whole file to one drive but the downside is if there's a disk error on either drive that file is toast.
Here's a quality tutorial from Hardware Secrets explaining what RAID is an how to create a RAID array if you decide to do so: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/393.
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