Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just a single unit where your information is saved. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives is the same all of the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended 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 info located on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the info which will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the correct info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unexpected hardware malfunction.