RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard disk drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, the same data is saved on all the drives and the main benefit of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info kept on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the information that will be cloned on it will be recovered 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 each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content which you upload to your shared website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all hard drives in real time.