RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as 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, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives at the same time, 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 fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Hosting
Our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk part of the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also use standard hard disks which operate in RAID for storing backups, so in case you include this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.