RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content which you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single 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 firm, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive fails, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the right data is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unpredicted hardware malfunction.