Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. 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 the fact that they all function as one single unit where your information is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives will be identical at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the exact setup - whether info is written on all drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the info which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your shared web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is called 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 kind of data is copied on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is changed, the information which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.