Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where your information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all the drives is the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance could differ based on the exact setup - whether data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is one more level of security for your info together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the info which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.