RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content which you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet 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 used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a problematic disk is replaced, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can 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 that we use on the physical machines where we set up VPS servers function in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the required data is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unexpected hardware malfunction.