Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all operate as a single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives will be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data saved on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to verify the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information that you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that are used for storing any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on such a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be duplicated on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive won't have an effect on the normal operation of your websites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers named checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.