RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of 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, etc. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info located on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content which you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.