Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all function as one single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives is exactly the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the info which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.