RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disk drives that work together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, identical data is saved on all of the drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.