RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you upload to the cloud hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced without any service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the websites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the info that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the info which is being copied is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.