RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the information which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info that you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.