Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives is exactly the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the exact setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content which you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives that are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on this type of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what info will be cloned on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive will not have an effect on the normal operation of your Internet sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.