Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where info is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the info which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be copied on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the faulty drive won't have an impact on the proper operation of your websites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers called checksums to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company offers are created on physical servers that employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the data cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will still be online since all the info will still load from at least 1 other drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be kept on standard hard drives which also work in RAID since we want to make certain that any sort of website content you add will be risk-free at all times. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.