Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where your information is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives is the same at all times, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ depending on the exact setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Hosting

The advanced cloud hosting platform where all hosting accounts are made employs fast NVMe drives rather than the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it's copied 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 information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your data in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID fails because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one right away without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of every single file.