RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has two huge advantages over using 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 accessible through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done 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, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.