Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as one single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives will be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ based on the exact setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 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 based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.