Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where information is saved. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives will be the same all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you add to the website hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without service interruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to worry about losing any info no matter what.