RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the disk drives in real time.