RAID
What is RAID? How exactly does RAID work? Find out about the advantages of employing a RAID-equipped server.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where info is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives shall be identical all the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
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RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your
shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.