RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The drives which we use for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you add to the website hosting account will be kept on multiple hard drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional 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 disruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.