RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information that you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.