Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just a single unit where data is saved. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your cloud web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the data that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your data is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you use one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk part of the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard disks that work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you include this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.