RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are created employs fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disks function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your info in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.