Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where your information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all of the drives is identical all the time, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether info is written on all of the 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 many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple disk drives and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced with no service disturbances 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 other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers which use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the info duplicated on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will stay online since all the information will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be stored on standard hard disks which also operate in RAID because we would like to make certain that any sort of website content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.