RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the information that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.