RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The drives that we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we work with. All the content that you add to the cloud website hosting account will be held on multiple disk drives and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed with no service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about losing any info no matter what.