RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs super fast NVMe drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your info in addition to the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.