RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The hard disks which we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you add to the shared hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed with no service disturbances and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one quickly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each and every file.