RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation 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 info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.