RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created employs fast NVMe drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disk drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your info along with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server employ quick NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The disk drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without loss if a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, your info will be kept on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on several disk drives.