RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard disks that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same data is kept on all drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.