Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives will be the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Web Hosting
All content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the info that is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of your files on the different drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.