Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where info is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives is the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you upload to your hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without service interruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the information which is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.