RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the data will be accessed from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed 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 so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.