Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all function as one single unit where your information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ based on the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information which you upload to your website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID breaks down because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive fails, the system can switch to another one instantly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.