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 employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The hard drives that we employ for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we use. All the content that you add to your cloud web hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without any service interruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never need to worry about losing any info no matter what.