Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives concurrently. 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 perform as just a single unit where data is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed 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 stored on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives which are used for saving any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on this type of a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be duplicated on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info on the new drive shall be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive will not have an impact on the proper operation of your sites in any way. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server employ super fast SSD drives which will boost the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The hard drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with multiple drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, the information will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this particular configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple disk drives.