RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are made employs super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disks function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your info along with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.