title: Why does RAID configuration on AWS EBS provide extra safety?
body: <p>I do not understand why AWS still encourages RAID configuration on EBS. I thought the volumes are replicated mutliple times within a single AZ. Optionally they can also be replicated to another AZ.</p>
  <p>On GCP you don't need to do this RAID configuration. The documentation explicitly discourages this.</p>
  <p>Quote: <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/raid-config.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/raid-config.html</a></p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Creating a RAID 0 array allows you to achieve a higher level of performance for a file system than you can provision on a single Amazon EBS volume. <strong>A RAID 1 array offers a &quot;mirror&quot; of your data for extra redundancy.</strong> Before you perform this procedure, you need to decide how large your RAID array should be and how many IOPS you want to provision.</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>Note, I am talking about <strong>safety</strong> / <strong>fault-tolerance</strong> in this question. I am not talking about performance, but at least from the GCP documentation they discourage striping disks together even for performance reasons:</p>
  <p>Quote: <a href="https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks</a></p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Compute Engine optimizes performance and scaling on persistent disks automatically. <strong>You don't need to stripe multiple disks together or pre-warm disks to get the best performance.</strong> When you need more disk space or better performance, resize your disks and possibly add more vCPUs to add more storage space, throughput, and IOPS</p>
  </blockquote>