RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, whether 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 particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting
accounts are created uses quick SSD drives rather than the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your info together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting
account from our firm, any content which you upload will be saved on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one immediately without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server
packages, any content you upload will be stored on SSD drives that function in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk from the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use ordinary hard disk drives which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.