RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.