RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a 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 saved on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your data together with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the information that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the information 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 warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the correct information is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of sudden hardware failure.