Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as just a single unit where data is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives is the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.