RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are made employs fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is one more level of security for your info along with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.