RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives at the same time, 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 fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, 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 recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on this type of a hard drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what data will be cloned on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't have an effect on the proper operation of your websites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers called checksums to prevent silent data corruption.