How does striping work?

[bentomo]

Alright, so if you're super rich you can more then one SSD, and stripe them to multiply their speed. I have a couple questions about it.

How does it work?
How much space do you lose when you stripe?
How efficient is it? (in a perfect world it world it would just double your speed if you had 2 of the same drive, but how much does it really increase speed?)

 

[berry120]

Search around for RAID 0 - that's the one you want. Essentially half the data is written to each disk, and then it's read back in parallel across all the disks at once. There's a few overheads though - you won't get double the speed. But you will get significantly more.

RAID 0 doesn't lose you any space - but it's catch is that if any one of your hard drives packs up, all your data is gone. Kaput. There are other levels that offer much more resilience, such as 5 (where you can lose one disk and all your data will be safe) and 6 (you can lose up to 2 disks and it'll all be safe.)

Have a Google around - I could explain more here but it's been covered in detail many times in other places.

 

[GibsonSGKing]

It's quite literal. Lets say we have a 100mb file, and it's written in 2mb stripes. The first 2mb is on the first disk, the next 2mb is on the second, then the first, then the second, and so on. That way it reads and writes the data from them faster.