Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as one single unit where information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the info which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.