Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as a single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated employs super fast SSD drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disks work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is another level of protection for your information along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the data that will be copied on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the info which is being duplicated is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.