Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all operate as just one single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives shall be the same all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ based on the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you upload to your cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced without any service disturbances and the information 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 in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data cloned on such a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be copied on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the faulty drive won't affect the normal operation of your websites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers named checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.