Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives will be the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Web Hosting

All content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site 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 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.