Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives will be 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 remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ based on the exact setup - whether info is written on all 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, and many others.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the info which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud web hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the disk drives in real time.