RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is saved on all drives and the key advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed 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 located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is performed 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 one more level of security for the content which you upload to your website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.