RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data copied on this type of a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't affect the adequate operation of your Internet sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers named checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.