Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as a single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives will be the same all of the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on such a drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what info will be duplicated on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info on the new drive will be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the problematic drive won't have an effect on the adequate operation of your sites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.