Raid 0 Drive count Best Practices

pkn2

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Mar 29, 2011
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I was wondering does an odd number of drives in a RAID 0 cause inefficiencies in the splitting of the info? In other words is a RAID 0 with 3, 5 or 7 drives naturally sightly less efficient than a RAID 0 with 4, 6 or 8 drives because of the "uneven" splitting of the info? And I realize the more drives the better as long as the info is large enough for the drives to share the load. But would a Raid with 4 drives be almost as efficient as a 5 drive RAID because the info can be more efficiently split?

Anybody have any experience with this or know the algorithms used well enough to comment?

 
Solution
Odd number of drives in a RAID 0 does not negatively impact the performance of RAID 0 array. When you stripe (RAID 0), you will create a block on each drive of the same size for each drive in the array. I would expect a 3 drive RAID0 to be approximately 50% faster than a 2 drive RAID 0 and a 5 drive RAID 0 to be approximately 25% faster than a 4 drive RAID 0. There is no "uneven" way of splitting data in RAID 0, you may be thinking of RAI10 which requires an even number of drives.
Odd number of drives in a RAID 0 does not negatively impact the performance of RAID 0 array. When you stripe (RAID 0), you will create a block on each drive of the same size for each drive in the array. I would expect a 3 drive RAID0 to be approximately 50% faster than a 2 drive RAID 0 and a 5 drive RAID 0 to be approximately 25% faster than a 4 drive RAID 0. There is no "uneven" way of splitting data in RAID 0, you may be thinking of RAI10 which requires an even number of drives.
 
Solution