RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind 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 information stored on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is copied to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID fails because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each and every file.