RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks which operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is saved on all drives and the basic benefit of using such a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
RAID in Web Hosting
Our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disks work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your information along with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops working since the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to another one promptly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.