RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard disk drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. Either way, the same info is stored on all drives and the key benefit of using this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, which means that absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is another level of protection for your data in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info that is being duplicated is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the separate drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk within the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the defective one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use standard hard disks that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.