RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended 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 data kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to confirm the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your shared web hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.