Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as a single unit where your information is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives shall be identical at all times, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synced on it.