RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, if 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 so on. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The drives that we employ for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you upload to the cloud website hosting account will be saved on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without any service disturbances and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about losing any information no matter what.