RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ many 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 identical. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.