RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same data is saved on all of the drives and the basic benefit of using this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The drives which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we work with. Any content that you upload to your cloud web hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any info no matter what.