Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where information is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives will be identical all the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info saved on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content which you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info that will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the data that is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.