RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you add to the website hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without any service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on such a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what info will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the problematic drive won't impact the proper operation of your Internet sites in any respect. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.