Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where your information is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives is exactly the same all the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ based on the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Web Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our ground-breaking cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to the web hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced without any service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the data that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your info is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.