RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
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 operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on this kind of a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be copied on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive will not have an effect on the adequate operation of your sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.