RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In either case, identical info is saved on all drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you upload to the hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced without service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever have to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.