Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The advanced cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is another level of security for your info together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive fails, the system can switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each file.