Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all work as one single unit where your information is saved. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives is the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether info is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is 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 data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is another level of protection for your information in addition to the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on this type of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the faulty drive will not have an effect on the proper operation of your sites in any respect. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.