RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disk drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into different ones using virtualization software. Either way, identical data is stored on all the drives and the main advantage of using such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.
RAID in Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synced on it.