RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your cloud website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your data is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the info which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the right info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives operating 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 as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of sudden hardware malfunction.