RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disks that function together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into individual ones through virtualization software. In any case, the same information is saved on all drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.
RAID in Website Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new website hosting account will be saved on fast SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.