RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The disk drives which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we work with. All the content that you add to your web hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done so as to guarantee that the info which is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.