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 many hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all 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. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort 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 info located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the information that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on such a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what info will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive shall be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the faulty drive won't affect the adequate operation of your Internet sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers referred to as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.