RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we work with. Any content that you add to your shared web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced without any service interruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.