RAID 0, or disk striping, distributes data blocks across multiple drives to function as a single logical volume. It requires a minimum of two disks. The total capacity equals the sum of all member drives, and I/O performance scales linearly with the number of disks due to simultaneous data access across the physical layer.
How it works
The RAID controller splits incoming data into segments called stripes and writes them in parallel. In a two-drive configuration, the first data block is sent to Drive 0, while the second is sent to Drive 1. This architecture removes the throughput bottleneck of a single physical interface during heavy sequential operations.
The primary risk is the total lack of fault tolerance. The failure of a single drive results in the immediate loss of all data on the entire array, as file fragments are distributed across all physical members. The statistical probability of failure increases with every additional drive added to the stripe set.
RAID 0 is suitable only for high-performance tasks involving non-critical data: video editing scratch space, swap partitions, or temporary rendering directories. Technical fact: a four-drive SATA SSD RAID 0 array can achieve sequential read speeds near 2000 MB/s, effectively saturating the controller bus, whereas a single drive is capped at approximately 550 MB/s.