RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard drives which function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, identical info is kept on all of the drives and the basic advantage of employing such a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance because 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 the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may vary.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives that are used for storing any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on such a drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be cloned on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive shall be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive will not impact the adequate operation of your sites by any means. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers known as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.