RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard disk drives which function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same info is stored on all drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance because 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 of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
RAID in Website Hosting
Our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are created uses quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disks function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it's 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 info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is another level of security for your info together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a defective disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.