Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where info is stored. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary depending on the exact setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the information that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is cloned to a brand 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 disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.