Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as a single unit where information is kept. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Website Hosting
The hard drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you upload to the website hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without any service disturbances and the information 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 info and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the info which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the data is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions 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 ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.