RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed 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, etc. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive fails, it is replaced and the info which will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the correct information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of unexpected hardware failure.