RAID-0 Volume Guidelines

• Concatenation uses less CPU cycles than striping and performs well for small random I/O and for even I/O distribution.

• When possible, distribute the components of a stripe or concatenation across different controllers and busses. Using stripes that are each on different controllers increases the number of simultaneous reads and writes that can be performed.

• If a stripe is defined on a failing controller and another controller is available on the system, you can “move” the stripe to the new controller by moving the disks to the controller and redefining the stripe.

• Number of stripes: Another way of looking at striping is to first determine the performance requirements. For example, you might need 10.4 Mbytes/sec performance for a selected application, and each disk might deliver approximately 4 Mbyte/sec. Based on this formula, then determine how many disk spindles you need to stripe across:

  10.4 Mbyte/sec / 4 Mbyte/sec = 2.6

  Therefore, you need three disks capable of performing I/O operations in parallel.