Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all operate as a single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives shall be the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary based on the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting accounts are made employs super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your info along with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one quickly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.