RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard disks that function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into individual ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is kept on all drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called 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 particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is replaced, the information which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally because RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.