RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Website Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.