Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might 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 one single unit where data is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.