RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the information that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to verify the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the data which is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.