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Defining RAID Level 0 (Disk Striping) Also referred to as striping, RAID Level 0 is a performance oriented mapping technique to create simple disk arrys. Level 0 simply uses disk spanning to create a single logical volume across multiple physical drives. Uniform subsets of the array's logical volume, called stripes, are mapped in regular sequence to an array's member drives. Utilising either independent or parallel access, RAID Level 0 provides high I/O performance at low cost. However, the reliability of RAID Level 0 is less than any of its member disk drives due to its lack of redundancy. For this reason, and despite the name RAID, Level 0 is not RAID, unless it is combined with other techniques to provide the RAID functions of data redundancy, regeneration and reconstruction. RAID Levels 2 through 6, as well as hybrid levels such as 10, are examples of such combinations. Best performance can be achieved by spreading the capacity load by ensuring each drive has a separate controller. This level of Raid should never used in mission critical environments. RAID Level 0 is used extremely effectively in media environments as working or scratch drives when working with data such as digital video editing, high resolution image manipulation, and digital music recording. The data and files should be migrated to a secure storage platform on completion and never stored permanently on any Level 0 volume. RAID 0 is the easiest RAID Level to implement with a very simple design structure in comparison to levels offering data parity and redundancy. In summary, RAID 0 can offer tremendous performance advantages than a single drive, but the penalty can be even less fault tolerance will exist than the single drive it replaced. This level is extremely popular amongst the video industry as it is quite capable of delivering more than enough data to run full video, animation, and high-intensity graphics. Level 0 is the fastest RAID level available. However, because of the lack of fault tolerance, if one of the drives fails all the data is lost. This level should only be used as a working drive (or 'scratch' drive) and not for storage. Next:
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