RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard disks that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is stored on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of 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 may vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data cloned on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive will be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't impact the normal operation of your websites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers known as checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.