RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two huge 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 accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of 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, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the data which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.