RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content which you upload to your web hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the data which is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.