RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard disks that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In any case, the same info is kept on all of the drives and the main advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is another level of security for your data in addition to the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.