RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are made uses fast NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.