RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, if 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 may vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created 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 information located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the data that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.