RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled 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, and so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information stored on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to verify the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info that you upload to your cloud web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.