RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on multiple hard drives that work together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into individual ones through virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is kept on all of the drives and the basic benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet 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 employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info 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 the hard drives in real time.