RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, 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 exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file adequately and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your shared website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the disk drives in real time.