Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as a single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The hard disks which we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you upload to the shared website hosting account will be held on multiple drives and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced with no service disturbances and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your data is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing 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 have to worry about the integrity of your files.