RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.