RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

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