RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to verify the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.