RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into different ones using virtualization software. Either way, identical information is saved on all drives and the basic benefit of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is another level of security for your information along with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.