RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
Our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, 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 is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is another level of security for your data in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that are used for storing any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on this type of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive won't affect the normal operation of your websites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers referred to as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.