Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all function as one single unit where info is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives shall be the same all of the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present 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 will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary based on the exact setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

The hard drives that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you add to your hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced without any service interruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever need to worry about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content that you upload will be held on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive fails, the system can switch to a different one immediately without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of every single file.