Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just a single unit where your information is kept. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives is the same all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.