RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disk drives that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is kept on all the drives and the key benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are created uses quick SSD drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disk drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of security for your information along with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content you upload will be stored on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down since 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 the fact that even in case a drive fails, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each and every file.