RAID 0

RAID 0: the classic data striping configuration

RAID 0 is a technology that associates two or more hard drives together to create a single logical drive (partition). Disk clustering aims to improve performance for reading and writing data.

Definition of RAID 0

RAID 0 is a technique that consists of associating at least two hard disks in a striping aggregation. The written data is successively distributed over several physical drives to speed up their processing. Performance increases with the number of hard drives mounted together, provided you use a dedicated RAID controller.

It is possible to let the operating system manage only the disk management but at the cost of a loss of performance, which would lose the performance gain. The data is divided into bands, each unit of which is written successively on the disks mounted in series.

The main advantages of a RAID 0 disk system

Distributing data files allows two or more hard drives to work simultaneously and significantly reduces latency by sharing the cache. The performance increases dramatically with the number of disks that make up a cluster. The other advantage of RAID 0 is the addition of available space, provided that they are of the same capacity. In case of different capacity, the smallest volume is taken as a standard.

With several hard disks available, mounting in RAID 0 makes it possible to obtain a large partition. This is a great way to take advantage of old records. Compared to today's market leading SSD, RAID 0 remains affordable with equivalent capacity, as electromagnetic drives are much cheaper than flash drives. In addition, one is not limited by the SSD write/delete cycle.

Who uses RAID 0?

RAID 0 is used in all environments where the speed of data processing, or system performance, is paramount. At home, usually hardcore video gamers take advantage of this combination of records to gain valuable milliseconds on latency.

For professionals, video processing in multimedia agencies greatly benefits from RAID 0, the hard disk being a frequent bottleneck in the processing of gigabytes that follow one another. It should be noted that RAID 0 is not fault tolerant. A single failed drive will cause the loss of all data. It is therefore not suitable for storing sensitive data, such as database servers and web hosting.

Comparison between RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 5

While RAID 0 focuses on distributing tape data to speed up file processing, RAID 1 mirrors two or more hard drives to secure the data. Each inscribed byte is therefore duplicated, so in case of failure, the data is not corrupted. No performance gain is achieved and you lose 50% of the storage capacity. But, this is the most secure type of RAID.

The RAID 5 was created to gain security while maintaining performance. Therefore, the technique of distribution of data by striping is maintained, but parity bits are arranged regularly on all disks. In the event of a disk failure, these parity bits make it possible to recover the data bits. Read performance is assured, but writing parity bits slows data burning on hard drive tracks. It takes at least three hard drives to build a RAID 5.


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