RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, 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 particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.