RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all drives in real time.