Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where info is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives shall be the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ depending on the exact setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Website Hosting
The hard disks which we use for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to your website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives that are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on such a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be copied on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the malfunctioning drive will not have an effect on the adequate operation of your sites by any means. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers referred to as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.