RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort 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 special drive where data stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the 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 which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID fails as the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive fails, the system can switch to another one quickly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.