RAID
What's RAID? How exactly does RAID work? Find out about the advantages of employing a RAID-equipped server.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all work as one single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives is the same at all times, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether information is written on all the 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, etcetera.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.
