Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives shall be the same at all times, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the exact setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your cloud web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is employed 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 guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the right data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of sudden hardware failure.