RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

All content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on such a drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be copied on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive will not impact the normal operation of your websites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.