RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In any case, the same info is stored on all the drives and the main advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the data which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for 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 ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.