RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all 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, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you upload to your website hosting account will be held on multiple drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced without service disturbances and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be saved on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.