RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to worry about losing any info no matter what.