RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables 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 identical. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you add to the web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed without service disruptions and the information 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 to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to concern yourself with losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on such a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the problematic drive will not affect the normal operation of your sites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also use standard hard disk drives that operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.