Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all work 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 is identical all the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type 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 special drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.