RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind 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 specific drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The SSD drives that are used for holding any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive shall be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the problematic drive won't impact the normal operation of your websites at all. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers known as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.