RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard disk drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same info is saved on all of the drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your data together with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for saving any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on such a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be copied on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive will not affect the normal operation of your Internet sites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.