RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Web Hosting
The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the data which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to validate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives which are used for keeping any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on this kind of a disk drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive will not have an impact on the proper operation of your sites in any respect. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.