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RAID-0 Block Interleave Data Striping w/o Parity



RAID-0 Block Interleave Data Striping w/o Parity

Striping of data across multiple disk drives without parity protection is a disk data organization technique sometimes employed to maximize DASD subsystems performance (for example, Novell NetWare's data scatter  option).

An additional benefit of this organization is that of drive spanning . with data striped across multiple drives in an array, the logical drive size may be limited by the operating system.

 RAID-0 (Block Interleave Data Striping w/o Parity)
                   +----------+
                   |   Disk   |
                   |Controller|
                   +----+-----+
    +---------+---------+---------+---------+
    |         |         |         |         |
 +--+--+   +--+--+   +--+--+   +--+--+   +--+--+
 |XXXXX|   |XXXXX|   |XXXXX|   |XXXXX|   |XXXXX|  Block 0
 |-----|   |-----|   |-----|   |-----|   |-----|
 |yyyyy|   |zzzzz|   |     |   |     |   |     |
 |-----|   |-----|   |-----|   |-----|   |-----|
 |     |   |     |   |     |   |     |   |     |  Block n
 +-----+   +-----+   +-----+   +-----+   +-----+
  Disk 1    Disk 2    Disk 3    Disk 4    Disk 5
             xxxxx = Block belonging to a long file
   yyyyy and zzzzz = Blocks belonging to short files


Data striping improves the performance with large files since reads/writes are overlapped across all disks. However, reliability is decreased as the failure of one disk will result in a complete failure of the disk subsystem according to the formula:

                           Mean Time to Failure of a single Disk
   Mean Time to Failure = ---------------------------------------
                               Number of Disks in the array


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