RAID
Find out what precisely RAID is and the way RAID systems work. Just what are the great things about being hosted on a RAID-powered server?
RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The drives that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you upload to your cloud hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one of them shall 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 working, it'll be replaced with no service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.