Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where data is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives will be identical all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the specific setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work 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 specific drive where information located on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining 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 confirm the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the data that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the information is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we offer are generated on physical servers which use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the information cloned on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the right data is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will still be online as all the info will still load from at least one other disk drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be stored on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID as we would like to make certain that any kind of site content you upload will be protected all the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.