Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where data is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed 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 data stored on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the information which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive fails, it is changed and the info which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the correct info is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of unexpected hardware failure.