Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just a single unit where information is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives will be identical at all times, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ based on the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information that you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.