My wife Diane and I were out to dinner with our good friend Jake. All three of us like our tech, with Jake and myself capably wearing the title of “geek” due to our proclivities around things shiny and electronic. Of course, it is inevitable that when a few geeks get together there will be discussions about technology. In this case, our friend Jake mentioned that he is setting up a “RAID 5″ on his home computer.

Now, this puzzled my better half – and justifiably so – since I’m guessing most people haven’t heard about or know what the acronym “RAID” even means.

Of course, Jake, the-ever-helpful-friend that he is, began to launch into a verbal definition of what RAID is and why he was so excited about it.

His explanation was overly complex and not helpful, and we all knew it.

Jake shifted tactics.

A condiment carrier was present at our table. Jake grabbed a bottle of mustard and tried again: “Okay,  this is a hard drive.”

“Now, let’s add a second hard drive.” Jake grabbed another bottle, this time Tapatio hot sauce, and positioned it beside the mustard bottle. “This is RAID 0. In RAID 0, data is kept on each drive separately so the computer can read the data off each drive at the same time, making it faster than a single hard drive.”

“Unfortunately, this gives you no protection. If a hard drive fails, you have no backup.”

“So we do this…”

Jake moved the Tapatio bottle behind the mustard bottle. “Our second hard drive is now a complete mirror copy – a backup – of the first drive. This is RAID 1. It gives us great data protection, but it doesn’t make our speeds any faster. That is why I chose a third option…”

Jake grabbed a bottle of disturbingly-pink cranberry mustard. He moved the bottle of Tapatio and the newly acquired cranberry mustard into a straight line next to the original bottle of mustard. He paused for a moment, looking down upon the procession of sandwich toppers like a proud father may gaze at his newborn child. “Now this… this is what I’m doing. This is RAID 5.” Jake paused again. Was he awaiting applause?

“RAID 5 uses a minimum of three drives. Data – and information about this data, called parity, is added to each drive. In RAID 5, information is shared between each drive, increasing the speed, but you still have data protection because the parity information is shared between the drives. It is a great solution!”

Diane nestled back in her chair, an understanding look on her face: Jake’s example, now supplemented with pictures, was easily understandable and quite memorable.

As an observer, what was most exciting to me was seeing how simply adding visual thinking to the conversation (imagery, relational placement, etc.) helped to make a confusing topic so much less confusing.  Visual thinking for the win!