RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disk drives which function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is saved on all of the drives and the basic advantage of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is written 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 different RAID types may vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.