RAID 0 | Striping with No Redundancy

RAID Level 0

RAID Level 0 – (2 Drive Minimum – no Fault Tolerance) Block Level Striping without Parity or Mirroring:  Because this type of RAID offers no fault tolerance or redundancy it is technically not actually RAID.  Raid 0 offers the best performance of all the RAID levels.  Data is broken down into fragments called blocks and is then written to all drives in the ‘array’ simultaneously across what is called a ‘stripe’ (on the corresponding disks in the same sector).  When data is read it is broken down into smaller pieces which can be read in parallel thereby increasing bandwidth.  With RAID 0 if any drive fails all data is lost across the entire ‘array’.  Even at minimum the likelihood of a catastrophic loss is double that of a single drive without any RAID at all.  RAID 0 should never be used alone for critical data.