Hardware-Based Striping

Most external storage devices provide striping capabilities. The most commonly used striping techniques to improve storage performance are RAID 0 and RAID 5.

This section contains the following topics:

RAID 0 Striping

RAID 0 requires at least two devices to implement. Data blocks written to the devices are split up and alternatively stored across the devices using the stripe size. This technique enables the use of multiple devices and multiple channels to the devices.

RAID 0, despite its RAID name, is not redundant. Loss of a device in a RAID 0 configuration results in data loss, and should always be combined with some redundancy in a critical environment. Database implementations using RAID 0 are often combined with RAID 1, basic mirroring, in RAID 0+1 configurations.

RAID 5 Striping

RAID 5 configurations spread data across the available devices in the RAID group using a hardware-specific stripe size. Consequently, multiple devices and channels are used to read and write data. Due to its more complex parity calculation, not all storage devices support RAID 5 configurations.