RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to confirm the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info that you upload to your hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk within the RAID fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ standard hard disk drives which function in RAID for storing backups, so in case you include this service to your VPS package, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.