RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for 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 the same. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data 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 functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synced on it.