Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where information is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives will be the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you add to your website hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed with no service interruptions and the information will be recovered 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 guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on this type of a hard drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be copied 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 make sure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the problematic drive will not have an effect on the proper operation of your websites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers identified as checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.