Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where data is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all of the drives is the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the data which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the various drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.