RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the info which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the websites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the info that is being copied is correct, so as soon as 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 information since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the various drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.