RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.