RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this type of a drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what information will be copied on the latter shall be a combination 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 will be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue working normally and the faulty drive will not impact the adequate operation of your sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.