RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The hard drives that we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you add to the cloud web hosting account will be held on multiple disk drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is changed, the data which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.