Networking

RAID 0: Stripe Set Without Parity

Although it's given RAID status, RAID 0 does not actually provide any fault tolerance; in fact, using RAID 0 might even be less fault tolerant than storing all of your data on a single hard disk.

RAID 0 combines unused disk space on two or more hard drives into a single logical volume with data being written to equally sized stripes across all the disks. By using multiple disks, reads and writes are performed simultaneously across all drives. This means that disk access is faster, making the performance of RAID 0 better than other RAID solutions and significantly better than a single hard disk. The downside of RAID 0 is that if any disk in the array fails, the data is lost and must be restored from backup.

Because of its lack of fault tolerance, RAID 0 is rarely implemented. Figure 2 shows an example of RAID 0 striping across three hard disks.

Figure 2 RAID 0 striping without parity.