Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all function as a single unit where information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the data on all the drives is identical all the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.