RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard drives which function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, identical info is kept on all the drives and the basic benefit of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple 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 a single one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data which will be copied 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 information which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with extremely fast SSD drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The hard drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your info will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this kind of configuration your information will always be safe since it will be available on several drives.