software RAID-0 recommendations

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 15:11, Christopher J. Bottaro wrote:
> Matthew Miller wrote:
> > all RAID 0 does is double your chance of catastrophic
> > drive failure.
> 
> what about doubling your read/write speed?  =P
> 
> p.s. i do understand that you won't get exactly linear speedup for each hard
> drive added to a RAID-0, but i'm just sayin...
> 

Every raid structure has benefits and disadvantages.

raid 0 --  striping -- faster writes than single drives at the
disadvantage of more failure points and no redundancy

raid 1 -- mirroring -- faster reads & redundancy - at the expense of
doubled physical drives and slower writes

raid 5 -- striping with parity -- faster writes, more fault tolerant,
less extra hardware than raid 1 -- at the expense of slower write than
raid 1 due to the parity stripe that has to be written.

This is not an exhaustive list, but just note that the only improvement
with raid 0 is read/write speed and an  overall loss of reliability
because of the increased failure points.

IF your slowdown is the actual drive IO then raid 0 can produce and
improvement,  BUT ..... .

Please always analyze the actual problem and then decide which is best. 
Many do not need the gain from using raid 0 (but some do).