RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard disk drives which function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is kept on all drives and the main benefit of using this type of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
RAID in Website Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synced on it.