Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where info is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives is exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without any service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which we offer are created on physical servers that use NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the information duplicated on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online because all the info will still load from at least one more hard disk. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your data will be kept on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID since we want to make sure that any sort of site content you upload will be risk-free all the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.