RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disks which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In any case, identical data is kept on all the drives and the main benefit of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on such a drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what info will be duplicated on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working normally and the malfunctioning drive won't have an impact on the proper operation of your sites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers referred to as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.