Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just one single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Web Hosting

Our advanced cloud web hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are created employs quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data along with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.