RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, 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, etc. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synced on it.