Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where information is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the info 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. That is done to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.