RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disks that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same information is saved on all the drives and the main advantage of employing such a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synced on it.