RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created 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 kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the info 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 information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information you upload to your cloud hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the data which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the data that is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data which will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the needed data is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks working 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 since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of unforeseen hardware failure.