RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard drives which function together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same data is kept on all of the drives and the main advantage of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The SSD drives which are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data cloned on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be duplicated on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't have an effect on the normal operation of your sites at all. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers named checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.