Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all function as just a single unit where info is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives shall be the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether info is written on all drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information stored on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the information that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the hard drives in real time.