RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same information is saved on all of the drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information 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 indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your information along with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.