RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, 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 in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The hard disks that we use for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you upload to the shared hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to worry about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the info that is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the various drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.