RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard drives that work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same info is saved on all of the drives and the key advantage of employing such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that we provide are made on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the info cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online because all the data will still load from at least one more hard disk. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be kept on standard disk drives which also work in RAID because we want to make certain that any sort of site content you add will be safe and sound all of the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.