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 multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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, and so on. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Hosting
The drives which we use for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you add to your hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced with no service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with losing any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive fails, the system can switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.