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 many hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned 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 data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your data together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.