RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disk drives that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same info is saved on all the drives and the main advantage of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue working normally and the problematic drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your sites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers referred to as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.