RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard disks which function together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. In any case, identical info is stored on all drives and the key advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info kept on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data 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 - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done so as to guarantee that the information which is being duplicated is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.