Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all work as a single unit where information is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives is identical at all times, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Website Hosting
The drives which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you upload to your website hosting account will be held on multiple drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without any service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that are used for holding any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be duplicated on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the problematic drive will not impact the normal operation of your websites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers named checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS
The physical servers where we make virtual private server use extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the site content without loss in case a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the data will be kept on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe since it will be available on several disk drives.