Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all of the drives will be the same all the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the info that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info that you upload to your website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on such a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be duplicated on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue working normally and the faulty drive will not have an effect on the adequate operation of your sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers identified as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.