RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you upload to your website hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without any service interruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data that will be copied on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the information that is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.