RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the data that is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.