Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where info is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all of the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary based on the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you add to the shared web hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed with no service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.