RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created 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 data kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data duplicated on this type of a disk drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be duplicated on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info on the new drive shall be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the problematic drive will not have an impact on the proper operation of your sites in any respect. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers called checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.