RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard drives that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. In any case, the same data is saved on all drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you upload to the hosting account will be kept on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service interruptions 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 remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be copied on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info that is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.