RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Web Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that 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 case one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the data which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content which you upload to your web hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic 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. We do this to guarantee that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
All virtual private server accounts that we offer are created on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the information duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct info is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will still be online because all the information will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID as we want to make sure that any content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.