Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where your information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all the drives is the same all the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you add to the cloud web hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed with no service interruptions and the info 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 to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.