RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same information is saved on all the drives and the main benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data cloned on such a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be duplicated on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't impact the proper operation of your sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses specific digital identifiers called checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up virtual private servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is changed and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the required information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of unpredicted hardware failure.