RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.