RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your data in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the info that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done so as to guarantee that the data which is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.