Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where information is saved. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all of the drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your shared web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.