Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as one single unit where information is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives will be identical at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are generated employs super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disks operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so practically nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your info together with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.