Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just one single unit where your information is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives is the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the info 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 performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives that are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data cloned on such a drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what data will be duplicated on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive won't have an effect on the normal operation of your Internet sites at all. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers referred to as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.