Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where your information is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to verify the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info that you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the drives in real time.