RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The drives which we use for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced without any service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the 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 if a hard drive stops working, the system can switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each and every file.