RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of security for your data together with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops working because the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system can switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.