Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where information is saved. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the exact setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed 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 located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information that will be duplicated 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 adequately and to verify the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive fails, the system can switch to another one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.