Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all operate as just one single unit where data is saved. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives shall be the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your info along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.