RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disk drives that work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into independent ones using virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same info is saved on all the drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard 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 show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the data which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive fails, the system can switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.