RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard drives that work together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. In either case, the same information is saved on all of the drives and the basic benefit of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to verify 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 web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.