RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into individual ones via virtualization software. In any case, the very same data is kept on all the drives and the basic advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced 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 indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the information that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.