RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard disk drives which function together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same info is kept on all of the drives and the basic advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives that we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further 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 disturbances and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a defective disk is replaced, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The SSD drives that we use on the machines where we create virtual private servers function in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive fails, it is changed and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the required info is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of sudden hardware failure.