Knowledge Base

RAID 0 Definition

RAID 0 is the lowest level of RAID and is otherwise known as a Stripe Set. Stripe sets are a type of software RAID. They can utilize free space on up to 32 different physical disks. When you write to a stripe set, some of the data is written to each of the physical disks in the set. Stripe Sets offer no fault tolerance or data recovery.

Under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, a Stripe Set consisting of two disks writes a 64k block to the first drive in the stripe then writes the next 64k block to the second drive. In other words, if you had a 128k file half of it would be written on one drive and the other half written on the other drive. So it follows that if one of the drives failed roughly half of your data would go with it. Tape drives or other such backups are not considered in determining RAID levels, and there is no other copy of the information that existed on that drive, it has proven to not be fault tolerant and there is no error recovery. Because you have to create Stripe Sets from free space, the system partition can never be included in a Stripe Set. However, the trade off is that the data is spread across multiple disks. You are effectively using the combined caches and read/write capabilities, which increases performance over a single drive. RAID 0 is the only RAID level NT Workstation supports.

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