Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives shall be the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the data that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.