RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content you upload to your cloud web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the disk drives in real time.