Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as just one single unit where your information is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all of the drives shall be exactly the same all of the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the information 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 in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content you upload to your hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data that will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the needed information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of unexpected hardware failure.