RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard disk drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is kept on all drives and the main advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on this kind of a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive shall be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the malfunctioning drive will not have an impact on the proper operation of your sites in any respect. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.