RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two 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 accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you upload to your cloud hosting account will be held on multiple drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced with no service disturbances and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the data that is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.