RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the information which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to validate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the information that will be copied on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is changed and the information which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sudden hardware malfunction.