RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same data is kept on all drives and the basic advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the info that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.