RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disk drives which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into individual ones through virtualization software. In any case, identical information is saved on all drives and the basic advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's 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 error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the info which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.