RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed 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. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information stored on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the information which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on this type of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be copied on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the faulty drive won't have an impact on the adequate operation of your sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our advanced cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers called checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.