RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into individual ones through virtualization software. In either case, identical information is saved on all drives and the main advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file correctly and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info that you upload to your hosting account along with 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
If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive fails, the system could switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each file.