Quick story - I provided consulting support for company with network. Their admin ran backups on the SAME TAPE every night. One night the drive failed while backing up. There's no redundancy in using one tape and they lost everything.
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (now termed redundant array of independent disks). Initially there was one raid, now there are several types.
Raid 0 - Striped disks. Distributes across several disks improving speed. If one disk fails, all is lost (which is why you run backups). It's what I run on my workstation, but not servers.
Raid 1 - mirroring
Raid 5 - striped disks with parity
Raid 6 - striped disks with dual parity
Raid 10 - striping and mirroring
Raid was first envisioned to run with 5 disks. I'm striping with 2, and some require minimum of 3. You cannot run RAID with one disk.