RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disk drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is saved on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.