Disk Striping - LSI MegaRAID Enterprise 1600 Hardware Manual

Disk Striping

Disk striping writes data across multiple disk drives instead of just one disk drive. Disk striping
involves partitioning each drive storage space into stripes that can vary in size from 2 KB to 128
KB. These stripes are interleaved in a repeated sequential manner. The combined storage space is
composed of stripes from each drive. MegaRAID supports stripe sizes of 2 KB, 4 KB, 8 KB, 16
KB, 32 KB, 64 KB, or 128 KB. For example, in a four-disk system using only disk striping (as in
RAID level 0), segment 1 is written to disk 1, segment 2 is written to disk 2, and so on. Disk
striping enhances performance because multiple drives are accessed simultaneously, but disk
striping does not provide data redundancy.
Stripe Width Stripe width is the number of disks involved in an array where striping is implemented. For
example, a four-disk array with disk striping has a stripe width of four.
Stripe Size The stripe size is the length of the interleaved data segments that MegaRAID writes across
multiple drives. MegaRAID supports stripe sizes of 2 KB, 4 KB, 8 KB, 16 KB, 32 KB, 64 KB, or
128 KB.
Chapter 2 Introduction to RAID 7