RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, if 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 vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content which you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.