RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The advanced cloud web hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is another level of security for your data along with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID breaks down because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data 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 stops working, the system can switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.