RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The hard disks that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you add to your cloud web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever need to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on such a drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what data will be copied on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive will not have an impact on the normal operation of your Internet sites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.