RAID
Discover the advantages of having your sites and applications hosted on a RAID-enabled server.
RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content which you upload to your hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.