RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Web Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard drives work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your info in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the info which will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the required information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unpredicted hardware failure.