Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where data is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives is identical all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary according to the exact setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed with no service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for storing any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on such a drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what data will be duplicated on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't impact the proper operation of your sites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.