RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are made employs super fast SSD drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is another level of security for your information in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.