RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Web Hosting
Our advanced cloud hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your data together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops functioning, the system can switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.