RAID
Discover what precisely RAID is and also the way RAID systems work. Just what are the great things about being located on a RAID-powered server?
RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into independent ones using virtualization software. Either way, the same information is stored on all drives and the basic benefit of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is recorded 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 and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.