Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where data is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives shall be the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary depending 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, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is another level of protection for your data along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.