RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disks that work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is kept on all the drives and the main benefit of using this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, therefore practically nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is another level of security for your data together with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the Internet sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data which is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the different drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.