RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of 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 just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses quick SSD drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is another level of protection for your data along with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives that are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data duplicated on such a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what info will be copied 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 make sure that the data on the new drive shall be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the faulty drive will not have an impact on the normal operation of your Internet sites at all. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers named checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.