RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same information is kept on all drives and the main advantage of using this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data which will be copied on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info which is being duplicated is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.