RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the information that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS
The physical servers where we make virtual private server employ super fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The disk drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you pick our backup service, the data will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this kind of configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of disk drives.