Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where data is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created 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 extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information you upload to your hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the information that will be copied on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the data that is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS
In case you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also employ regular hard disk drives which work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you include this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.