Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where info is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file correctly and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all hard drives in real time.