Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all operate as a single unit where information is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created employs fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other 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 data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is one more level of security for your data together with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.