RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses quick SSD drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disk drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining 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 data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the state-of-the-art 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

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be saved on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced 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 that is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops working as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.