RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information that you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is replaced, the info that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.