RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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 so on. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content which you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting 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 duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.