RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The hard disks that we use for storage with our innovative cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we use. Any content that you add to your cloud web hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without any service disturbances and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the info that will be copied on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the information which is being cloned is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.