Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where info is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives will be identical all of the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the data that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud web hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data copied on this type of a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the problematic drive won't impact the adequate operation of your sites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers called checksums to prevent silent data corruption.