RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disks operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is another level of protection for your information in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.