RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, 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, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are made uses fast SSD drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disks operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your info along with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.