RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to confirm the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the data that is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.