Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all function as a single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives shall be identical all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ based on the exact setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info 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 be no service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is replaced, the information that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.