Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as one single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all the drives shall be identical all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

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 that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated 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 that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all hard drives in real time.