RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard disk drives which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. In either case, the same information is saved on all of the drives and the key advantage of using such a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds 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 info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your info in addition to the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.