RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disk drives that work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. In any case, identical info is saved on all drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The disk drives which we employ for storage with our ground-breaking cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you add to your cloud website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed with no service disturbances 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 so as to ensure the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.