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What is RAID 0?

What is RAID 0?

 

The RAID 0 configuration is known as Data Striping. In laymen's terms, it means that two identical Hard Disk Drives act in parallel. More simply put, two disks perform the same work as a single disk at double the transfer rate. When utilizing the RAID 0 configuration, you will increase your capacity and your speed. The disadvantage is that you also increase your risk of failure. Anytime that one disk fails in a RAID 0 configuration, all of the disks fail. The reason for this increased failure rate is that the data is fragmented across all of the disks. Rather than just segmenting the data streams independently on each disk, the data is fragmented across all of the disks in the sequence. Therefore the advantage of RAID 0 is in higher transfer capacity and speed. The disadvantage is potential for failure and lack of redundancy. If your computer is backed up on an external drive or if the data stored can be easily retrieved from another source, RAID 0 will provide a significant increase in transfer rate with each added hard disk. The other advantage to RAID 0 is that you create a single drive from your operating systems perspective even though the hardware includes multiple drives. That means you get huge storage capacity under a single drive letter (e.g., two 100 GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration look like one 200 GB drive to MS Windows).

source: searchwarp

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