Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as just a single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all of the drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.