RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is copied with an additional 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 copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that are used for holding any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on this kind of a disk drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what data will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't affect the normal operation of your websites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS
If you employ one of our virtual private server packages, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk part of the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ standard hard disks which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.