RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard disks which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same info is stored on all drives and the basic benefit of using such a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the information which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.