RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disks which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same info is kept on all drives and the key benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you upload to the cloud web hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without any service interruptions 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 other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The SSD drives that we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive fails, it is replaced and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the required information is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unpredicted hardware failure.