0RAID 0

The standard RAID levels

are a basic set of RAID configurations that employ the techniques of striping, mirroring, or parity to create large reliable data stores from general purpose computer hard disk drives. The most common types today are RAID 0 (striping)

A RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume) splits data evenly across two or more disks (striped), without parity information and with speed as the intended goal. RAID 0 was not one of the original RAID levels and provides no data redundancy. RAID 0 is normally used to increase performance, although it can also be used as a way to create a large logical disk out of two or more physical ones.

A RAID 0 can be created with disks of differing sizes, but the storage space added to the array by each disk is limited to the size of the smallest disk. For example, if a 120 GB disk is striped together with a 320 GB disk, the size of the array will be 240 GB (120 GB × 2).

Size = 2 . min ( 120 GB, 320 GB)

         = 2 . 120 GB

         = 240 GB

The diagram shows how the data is distributed into Ax stripes to the disks. Accessing the stripes in the order A1, A2, A3, ... provides the illusion of a larger and faster drive. Once the stripe size is defined on creation it needs to be maintained at all times.

Performance

RAID 0 is also used in areas where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important, for example in some computer gaming systems. Although some real world tests with computer games showed a minimal performance gain when using RAID 0, albeit with some desktop applications benefiting, another article examined these claims and concluded: Striping does not always increase performance (in certain situations it will actually be slower than a non RAID setup), but in most situations it will yield a significant improvement in performance.