RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web 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 works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to validate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information which you upload to your hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data cloned on this kind of a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what info will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the faulty drive won't affect the normal operation of your sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers named checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server use high-speed NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The hard drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use a variety of drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the site content without any loss if a main drive stops working. In case you use our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although 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 all of the time. With this particular setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.