RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working flawlessly until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.