Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where info is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives is exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be held on multiple disk drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to worry about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is changed, the information that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions 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 warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.