RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work 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 information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content which you upload to your cloud hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data that is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.