RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

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