RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synced on it.