Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all work as a single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even if some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the data that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.