RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, so practically nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is one more level of security for your data together with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.