Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as a single unit where your information is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary according to the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced without service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.