Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where info is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ based on the specific setup - whether info is written on all drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The drives that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be held on multiple disk drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed with no service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.