RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard drives which function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same info is saved on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.