RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disks which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. In either case, the very same information is stored on all the drives and the key benefit of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced 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. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the data which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the drives in real time.