RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the info which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your shared web hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.