RAID 0 uses data striping to distribute writes across multiple drives simultaneously, delivering faster performance and greater storage capacity but with no fault tolerance and increased data loss risk.
RAID 0 Striping
For enterprise networks, I have not actually seen a lot of RAID 0 being used, but the concept of RAID 0 and striping really applies in many cases. So it is important to understand RAID 0 and what it does.
The first thing to understand is that data is written to these drives in blocks. So everything that we talk about is going to be at the block level.
But what is a block? It is just a bunch of ones and zeros. So this could be an example of a block. This would be probably too small for a block, but this is just an example of what a block is. We can actually change the size of the block, so this could be a block, or it could be two blocks, or it could be four blocks, or it could be eight blocks, whatever the case may be. Once again, usually blocks are a little bit bigger than this, but this is just giving you an example of how the data is broken into blocks, and we can specify the size of those blocks.
What happens is those blocks are then taken and written to the drive. So the first block is written to the first drive, the second block to the second drive, and so on and so forth. What this does is speed up the process, because now two drives could be writing, and writing is the longer process of these two. By the way, reading actually can be much faster, but when you are writing to drives it can take a little bit to actually commit that to the drive. Especially if you are talking about a magnetic media like spindle drives, then writing can take a while. So by striping this data, we actually can write twice as fast, or three times as fast, or four times as fast, depending on how many drives that we are using.
I am going to give you a visual of the same thing just so we understand what this concept is. Here is block A1, and then block A2, then block A3, then A4, then A5 and so on and so forth. So this is just representing the same exact information in a little different way.
But what does this do for fault tolerance? From a fault tolerance standpoint, if we lose one disk, we have lost half of the data. And the way this data gets written, we pretty much probably need all of the data in order for it to make sense. So if this file is split amongst both of these drives and then we lose one drive, we lose that file. Essentially, when we lose half of a RAID 0, we lose our information.
So what does RAID 0 do for us? It does increase the speed, as we mentioned. It increases our capacity. However, there is no fault tolerance, and because we have more disks that can go bad, it actually increases the risk of losing data. That increase depends on how many disks we have.
With RAID 0, we can choose: do we want two disks to stripe across? Do we want three? Do we want four? Do we want five? The more we stripe across, the more speed we get out of it, the more capacity we get out of it, but the more risk we have of losing our data.
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