Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where your information is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives shall be the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary based on the particular setup - whether data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you employ one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your information. 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 faulty one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use ordinary hard disks that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.