RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disk drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is kept on all drives and the main advantage of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is another level of protection for your information in addition to the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down because the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one right away without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each and every file.