RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard drives that work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In any case, the same data is kept on all drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the information which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.