RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard disks that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, the same data is stored on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing such a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are made uses fast NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disks work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated 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, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your data together with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.