RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same info is kept on all the drives and the basic advantage of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on 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 data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud website hosting accounts are made uses quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disks operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is one more level of security for your data along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning since the 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 if a disk drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one instantly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.