RAID
What is RAID? How exactly does RAID work? Find out about the pros of using a RAID-equipped server.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all work as a single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives shall be the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance can vary based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
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RAID in Cloud Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new
cloud hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synced on it.
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RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The data uploaded to any
semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data that will be cloned on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the info that is being copied is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
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RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create
VPS servers function in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive fails, it is changed and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the needed information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unexpected hardware failure.