RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the information 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 functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.