Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where info is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives is identical all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ based on the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort 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 specific drive where data located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a defective disk is changed, the data that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using 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'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you employ one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk inside the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use conventional hard drives which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS package, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.