RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The drives that we use for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you add to the cloud website hosting account will be saved on multiple hard drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without any service disturbances and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be held on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each file.