RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed 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. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to validate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as 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 kind of data is cloned on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions 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.