Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where info is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives is the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.