Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all function as just one single unit where info is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ based on the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining 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 correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content which you upload to your website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the data which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of unforeseen hardware failure.