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 take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the 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 exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.