RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on such a disk drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be cloned on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the problematic drive will not affect the adequate operation of your websites in any respect. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers called checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.