RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content that you upload to your hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for saving any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be duplicated on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue working normally and the malfunctioning drive will not affect the normal operation of your Internet sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums in order to prevent 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 ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of 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 stops working, it is replaced and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the correct info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of sudden hardware malfunction.