RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disk drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. Either way, identical info is saved on all the drives and the main advantage of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you upload to the cloud website hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed with no service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about the loss of any info no matter what.