RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.