RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disks that work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same info is stored on all of the drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we work with. Any content that you upload to your cloud website hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed with no service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any info no matter what.