RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed 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, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Web Hosting
Our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are made uses quick NVMe drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your info in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the information that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.