What is a RAID server, and why should I opt for one?
RAID stands for ‘Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks’. It is a technique for using multiple hard drives to provide fault tolerance. Normally, we will configure systems with 2 hard drives to use RAID 1 disk mirroring. All data is written to both drives simultaneously. Although at Netservers we only use high quality hardware, the worst can occasionally happen and hard drives do sometimes fail. With RAID 1, if one of the drives fails the system can continue to run normally with just the remaining drive. We can then schedule a mutually convenient time to replace the failed drive, meaning minimal downtime for your server. Without RAID, a single hard drive failure could result in several days downtime in the worst case scenairo that it was necessary to reinstall the operating system from scratch. Please note that on a RAID 1 system, the storage capicity is effectively halved. I.e. a pair of 40 GB hard drives will give you 40 GB of storage space, not 80 GB. If you have more advanced requirem
