RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, whether 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 Hosting

The drives which we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we use. All the content that you upload to the hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without any service disturbances and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data copied on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be duplicated on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive will not affect the normal operation of your sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic 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 named checksums to avoid silent data corruption.