RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disks that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In any case, the same info is stored on all drives and the basic advantage of employing such a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the info that 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 functioning normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The SSD drives which we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers work in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive fails, it is changed and the data which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the required data is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unexpected hardware malfunction.