Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where data is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives is the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the information which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.