RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two key 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 accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done 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. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file correctly and to validate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The SSD drives which we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive fails, it is changed and the information which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the required info is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sudden hardware failure.