RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our innovative cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you add to the cloud web hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without service disturbances and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the info that is being duplicated is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we create VPS servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the info that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the correct information is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unpredicted hardware failure.