Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all function as just a single unit where information is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives is the same at all times, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.