Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disks at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as a single unit where info is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives shall be exactly the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary based on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard drives function 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 duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is another level of security for your info in addition to the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done so as to guarantee that the info that is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the various drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you use one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use conventional hard drives that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS plan, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.