Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all function as a single unit where info is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives will be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all drives 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 so on.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your shared web hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The SSD drives which are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on this kind of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the malfunctioning drive will not impact the proper operation of your sites in any way. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.