RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard disks that operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is kept on all the drives and the main advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves 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 hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all drives in real time.