RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard drives which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same info is saved on all of the drives and the basic benefit of using such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.
RAID in Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.