RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of 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 so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information that will be copied on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the information which is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.