RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Our advanced cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is one more level of security for your info together with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the information that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that your data is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.