Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where info is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all of the drives will be identical all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate 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 data kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info that you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.