Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all work as just one single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The disk drives that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you add to the cloud web hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed with no 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 remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about losing any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives which are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on such a drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what information will be duplicated on the latter will 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 info on the new drive shall be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the malfunctioning drive will not impact the adequate operation of your sites in any way. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers called checksums to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server work with high-speed SSD drives that will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the site content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, your information will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on many drives.