Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is the fact that they all work as just one single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all of the drives shall be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content that you upload will be stored on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive fails, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.