RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard disk drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same info is saved on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your data along with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.