Using High Capacity Drives in a RAID-0 Stripe Volume

2015-11-11 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: backup, hard drive, HGST, Other World Computing, RAID, RAID-0, storage

Get HGST 8TB Ultrastar He8 Hard Drive at OWC.
Also utilized in the 32TB OWC Thunderbay 4 RAID-5 edition.

See the topology overview which discusses general considerations in using four or five or more large hard drives.

Questions? One-on-one consulting is available with Lloyd.

Example: one RAID-0 striped volume

Finder Info for 32 TB / 29.1 TiB RAID-0 stripe volume,
using 4 HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB hard drives

This example could be extended to any number of drives for increased performance which scales linearly to at least 5 drives. However, with a RAID-0 stripe volume, failure of any drive kills the entire volume; there is no fault tolerance.

The use of RAID-0 makes sense only for the highest performance demands. Yet in most cases the smart move for high performance is instead to use a large and very fast SSD. Exceptions include cases where very high capacity with high performance is required, such as with processing uncompressed 4K video.

In some cases, a striped RAID-0 may make sense as a small volume for special purposes; the remainder of the drive capacity can be used for a RAID-4/5 or single drives, etc.

When a striped RAID is used, nearline (always attached) backup as well as offsite backups are essential unless the contents are dispensable (e.g., temporary work files).

Given the risks of failure in a RAID-0, most of the performance of a 4-drive RAID-0 can be achieved using 5 drives in a RAID-4/RAID-5. For most users this makes a lot of sense and greatly blunts the risk of failure.

TIP: use diglloydTools IntegrityChecker to verify backup integrity.

SoftRAID view of a 32 TB / 29.1 TiB RAID-0 stripe volume, using 4 HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB hard drives