RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard drives that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, the same data is kept on all the drives and the main benefit of using such a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to validate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content that you upload to your cloud web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing 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 ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.