Disk Striping

Definition - What does Disk Striping mean?

Disk striping is a technique in which multiple smaller disks act as a single large disk. The process divides large data into data blocks and spreads them across multiple storage devices. Disk striping provides the advantage of extremely large databases or large single-table tablespace using only one logical device.

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Techopedia explains Disk Striping

Disk striping allows easier resource management, as backups only need to address single logical volumes, unlike other cases where several volumes are used. Disk striping also allows the spreading of I/O across several disks. For large applications which use several hundred gigabytes or terabytes of disk storage, disk striping is one of the best techniques to use. Disk striping is performed in different ways in storage systems. Disk striping is fault intolerant without parity.

Disk striping is available in two main types:

Single-user striping makes use of large data blocks and improves performance by allowing parallel transfers from multiple disks on a single user workstation.
Multi-user striping, on the other hand, improves performance on a multi-user environment by overlapping read operations on different disk drives.

One of the biggest advantages of disk striping is higher performance. There is one drawback with disk striping, however: low resilience. If one of the several disks crashes, all data could be lost unless a high-reliability array with hot swap capabilities is used.