RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disk drives which function together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In any case, identical data is stored on all of the drives and the key benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Hosting

The hard disks that we use for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you upload to your hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed with no service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The SSD drives that are used for holding any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on this kind of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be copied on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the problematic drive won't affect the adequate operation of your websites in any respect. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers named checksums to avoid silent data corruption.