Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where information is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives is exactly the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Website Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.