RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disk drives that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into separate ones via virtualization software. In either case, identical info is saved on all of the drives and the basic advantage of employing such a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if 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 saved on the other ones, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is another level of security for your data in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.