Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where information is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all drives will be identical all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which operate 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 another level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.