RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created employs quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disk drives function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your info in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you employ one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use regular hard disks which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.