Disk memory provides large, non-volatile storage. It uses rotating platters coated with magnetic surfaces and read/write heads. Disk access time has four components - seek time to position the head, rotational latency to wait for the desired sector, transfer time to read/write data, and controller overhead time. RAID (redundant array of independent disks) uses multiple disks for performance, reliability, and availability. Popular RAID levels include RAID 1 which uses mirroring for redundancy, and RAID 5 which uses distributed parity blocks.