Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where your information is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives will be identical all the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the data that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.