RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard disks that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same information is kept on all drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you upload to the cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service disturbances and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the data which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the info which is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.