RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we work with. Any content that you add to your website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced without any service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be copied on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the problematic drive won't impact the normal operation of your sites by any means. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers named checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.