Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just one single unit where information is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives shall be the same all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.