Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where info is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all the drives will be the same all of the time, so even if some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ based on the exact setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended 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. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the info which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is copied on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.