RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you use one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information 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 averted. We also use ordinary hard disk drives which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.