Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all work as just one single unit where information is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives will be identical all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to validate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data duplicated on this type of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive won't impact the proper operation of your Internet sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers called checksums to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites significantly. The hard disks function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with many different drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you take advantage of our backup service, the info will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this type of configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.