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Choosing Redundant Server Hardware - RAID Drives

Hard drives are your most vulnerable piece of equipment in your server, since they have moving parts and moving parts do wear out over time. That makes mirrored hard drives a big priority when choosing a redundant server make sure you look for this option when looking at dedicated hosting services. The easiest way to protect your server and your data from a hard drive failure is by mirroring the drive(s) so effectively one drive has the exact same information as the other and if one fails the other is still up and running. You can accomplish this in two ways using hardware RAID or a software RAID solution.

Different RAID Solutions for a Redundant Server

With Hardware RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) you can configure the drives to have mirrored images of each other and in some high end dedicated servers RAID systems support Spares (a drive already connected and running on standby incase one of your other drives fails it can be brought online so you continue to have a redundant set of drives. High end servers also have hot swappable drives allowing you to replace the drives without ever having to turn off the server.

High end servers can have RAID systems with onboard cache memory that acts as a buffer for the hard drives. This cache normally has its own failsafe of an onboard battery backup just in case the power dies while the server is transferring data to the hard drives. That way when the power is back on the cache finishes writing the data and there is less chance of corrupted data.

Software RAID is a budget version of mirroring the drives only it is done in the operating system which takes up some resources and is not as fast as a hardware RAID solution and does not offer battery backup or its own cache memory. Typically a software RAID solutions are offered on cheap dedicated servers that are not hardware redundant servers.