RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be saved on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.