Creating a RAID-0 Volume

A RAID-0 (striped) volume contains space on 2-32 separate hard disks. Data is written in 64-KB blocks (stripes) to each disk in the volume, in turn. A striped volume offers considerable improvement in read/write efficiency because the read/write heads on each disk are working together during each I/O operation. A striped volume offers a maximum amount of space equal to the size of the smallest disk multiplied by the number of disks in the volume. However, the striped volume does not offer fault tolerance; if any one disk is lost, the entire volume is lost. Note that the system or boot volume cannot be housed on a striped volume.

You can create a striped volume by using 2 to 32 separate hard disks in Disk Management. Use the following procedure:

1. In Disk Management, right-click any one disk to be made part of the striped volume and choose New Striped Volume.
2. The New Striped Volume Wizard starts and displays the Select Disks page. The disk you initially selected appears under Selected. Select the disks you want to use from the Available column and then click Add.
3. Disks you add appear in the Selected column. If you want to change the amount of space to be allocated, modify the value under Select the amount of space in MB. When done, click Next.
4. From the Assign Drive Letter or Path page, accept the default, choose another drive letter, or select the option to mount the volume in an empty NTFS folder if desired. Then click Next.
5. Choose the desired options in the Format Volume page and then click Next.
6. Review the information on the completion page and then click Finish.
7. If any of the disks to be used in the volume are configured as basic disks, you receive the same message previously, warning you that you will be unable to boot other operating systems. To create your volume, you must click Yes and convert these disks to dynamic storage, as discussed earlier in this tutorial.
8. The volume is created and formatted and appears in the Disk Management snap-in display.

CAUTION Remember that RAID-0 is not fault tolerant. As mentioned in previous section Table, RAID-0 writes data in 64-KB blocks to each disk in the array sequentially, thereby improving read/write performance. However, if you lose any one of the disks in the array, all data is lost and you must restore the data from backup after replacing the lost disk and re-creating the array.