RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disk drives work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is one more level of security for your info along with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the information which is being copied is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.