Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all function as just a single unit where info is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives is identical all of the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs super fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is another level of protection for your info along with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.