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 several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed with no service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of every single file.