RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disks which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same data is stored on all the drives and the key benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disk drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a 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 recorded on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is another level of security for your information along with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.