RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disk drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. In any case, identical info is saved on all drives and the key benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's 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 and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created 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 data kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to verify the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info that you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.