Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where information is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all the drives is identical all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one quickly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
All virtual private server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the data copied on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the right info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will stay online because all the info will still load from at least one more disk drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be kept on standard hard disks which also operate in RAID because we want to make sure that any content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.