RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard disk drives that work together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into independent ones via virtualization software. In either case, identical data is saved on all of the drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard drives function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's 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 some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your information along with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID fails as the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one quickly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content which 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.