RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you upload to the shared website hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced without any service disturbances and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.