RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all 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 save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created 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 kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to confirm the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your web hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.