RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disks that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. In any case, the same info is stored on all of the drives and the main advantage of using such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the information which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.