RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you upload to your cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced without service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never have to worry about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the info that will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.