RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall 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 duplicated on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the information that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.