RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. Either way, the very same information is kept on all the drives and the key benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the information which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information you upload to your website 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 Hosting
In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is cloned to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the 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 could switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.