Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all operate as a single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives is identical at all times, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made uses fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your information together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives that are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data cloned on this kind of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info on the new drive will be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the faulty drive won't have an effect on the proper operation of your sites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with super fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The hard disks function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use a variety of drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the website content without any loss if a main drive stops working. If you choose our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on multiple disk drives.