Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where info is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the websites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the info that is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server work with super fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The hard drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ many different drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the content without loss in case a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, the info will be kept on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this type of setup your info will always be safe since it will be available on multiple drives.