RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your shared web hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the info that will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the information which is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can 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 Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.