What is RAID 0

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Healthy RAID 0 Array

RAID 0 is a technology that combines two or more hard drives together and stripes data across the disks to improve performance for reading and writing data.

What is a RAID 0 configuration?

RAID 0 is a technique that consists of associating at least two hard disks in a striping aggregation. Data written to the drives is successively distributed over the physical disks to speed up the read/write performance. Performance increases with the number of hard drives mounted together, provided you use a dedicated RAID controller.

What are the main advantages of a RAID 0 array?

The main advantage to a RAID 0 array is speed. Distributing data across the array allows two or more hard drives to work simultaneously and significantly reduces latency of writes. The performance increases dramatically with the number of disks that make up an array. Another advantage is the disks are fully utilized as there is no parity or mirrored data to write.

Who uses RAID 0?

RAID 0 is used in all environments where the speed of data processing is paramount. At home, gamers, video editors or others that need fast disk, take advantage of this combination of records to gain valuable milliseconds on latency.

For professionals, databases or video processing in multimedia agencies greatly benefits from RAID 0, the hard disk being a frequent bottleneck in the processing of gigabytes that follow one another. It should be noted that RAID 0 is not fault tolerant. A single failed drive will cause the loss of all data. Backups or other data protection schemes must be implemented to protect data hosted on a RAID 0 array.

Can you recover data from a RAID 0 array?

Data recovery is possible from a RAID 0. A healthy RAID 0 array will have 2 or more drives and the data will be striped across the disks (see image below for an example of a healthy array).

Healthy RAID 0 Array

When a drive fails in a RAID 0 array, an experienced data recovery clean room team is needed. See image below for an example of a failed drive in a RAID 0.

RAID 0 Array with One Failed Drive

The clean room engineers will attempt to overcome the physical, mechanical or electrical issues that are preventing access to the drive. If they are successful, the array can be rebuilt and the data extracted. If the clean room team is not completely successful, it will take an experienced data recovery lab engineer to rebuild the array, rebuild the file system, virtually repair the volume and extract the data.

It is a similar situation when multiple drives fail in a RAID 0. See below for an example of multiple failed drives.

RAID 0 Array with Multiple Failed Drives

In this case, the clean room team will need to overcome the damage and image all of the drives. If they get less than 100% of the drives, then the lab engineers will need to rebuild the file system and virtually repair the volumes and extract the data.

Even with a partial image, it is still possible to get good data recovered from the array. Contact your Ontrack specialist for details on how we can assist with RAID 0 data loss events.

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RAID 0: The classic data striping configuration