RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled 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 exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a faulty disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.