Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where information is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives shall be the same all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ based on the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Website Hosting

The disk drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you upload to your website hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without any service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The SSD drives which are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what data will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the faulty drive won't have an impact on the adequate operation of your websites at all. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers called checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.