RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same information is stored on all drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info located on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after 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 as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to confirm the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the information which is being copied is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information 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.