RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort 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 data saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content which you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data cloned on this type of a hard drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what data will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working normally and the problematic drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your Internet sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers identified as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the right information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of sudden hardware failure.