Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where info is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The hard drives which we employ for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we use. Any content that you upload to your cloud web hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed with no service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is 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 cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you employ one of our VPS server packages, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the faulty one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use standard hard disks which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.