Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all function as one single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives is the same at all times, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file correctly and to validate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content which you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.