RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There're different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the disk drives in real time.