RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disk drives that function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. In either case, identical data is stored on all drives and the main advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your cloud web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the hard drives in real time.