Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives shall be the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all hard drives in real time.