Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where info is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives will be identical all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the data which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content that you upload to your cloud website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all disk drives in real time.