RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disk drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. In either case, identical data is kept on all drives and the basic advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses super fast SSD drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is one more level of security for your information in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info which 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 info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.