RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all 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 fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info that you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops working, the system can switch to another one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you employ one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also use ordinary hard drives which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.