RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, identical information is kept on all of the drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each file.