RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, identical information is kept on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of 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 a single one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses 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 special drive where info saved on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud web hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID fails since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the correct data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sudden hardware malfunction.