Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where info is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even if some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data 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, etc.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some 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, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is an additional level of security for your information along with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data duplicated on such a hard drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't affect the normal operation of your sites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers named checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.