Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where data is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives shall be the same at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Web Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synced on it.