Capable of putting extra HDDs and SSDs to good use, Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Drives (or RAID) is a neat feature when you’re as much of a data hoarder as I am. Depending on your configuration, RAID can enhance your transfer speeds, provide redundancy, or facilitate recovery, with high-end setups capable of providing different permutations and combinations of these facilities.

Meanwhile, low-level RAID configurations tend to offer a single facility alongside a handful of drawbacks, and RAID 0 is by far the worst of the bunch. While a striped setup may seem like a solid option when you want better performance, it has some noticeable drawbacks – to the point where I’d recommend ditching it and switching to other RAID configurations.

On paper, RAID 0 sounds like a decent idea

You get fast transfer speeds

Before I dive into the quirks of RAID 0, let me quickly explain how it works. RAID 0 sets up your HDDs or SSDs in a striped configuration, and write operations are performed across all drives. It splits the files into stripes and spreads them on each drive in the storage pool. This allows the read and write operations to be performed in parallel, and the underlying system can work with all the drives at once. Consequently, this distributed nature increases the transfer speed in RAID 0 configurations.

Leaving aside the drive controller overhead, network speeds (in case of a NAS), and other factors, RAID 0 provides better speeds the more drives you add to the setup, as more data can be read from and written to the storage drives via parallel operations.

Without any reduction in the overall capacity

If you have a limited budget and want excess storage capacity, the higher RAID levels may seem rather convoluted. Anything besides RAID 0 and RAID 1 tends to require more than two drives, with RAID 10 mandating at least four HDDs (or SSDs, if that’s what you prefer) in the storage pool.

Then there’s the fact that most RAID levels hog some storage capacity for mirrored or parity data, essentially reducing the overall space of your drives. Assuming you’re using all drives of the same capacity, you get the full storage space of each drive for your RAID 0 pool. Unfortunately, this is where RAID 0’s benefits end and its annoying problems emerge.

But it has some deal-breaking issues

No parity or mirror facilities

Although RAID isn’t a substitute for backups, the higher RAID levels offer some neat facilities to prevent data loss. RAID 1 and RAID 10, for example, mirror the data between multiple drives, so you won’t lose your precious files in case a drive ascends to the tech heaven out of nowhere.

Likewise, RAID 5 and 6 offer parity support, which is stored across your storage pool. But unlike mirrored setups, where these parity bits can be used to reconstruct the data should a drive conk out suddenly. Unfortunately, RAID 0 neither offers the fault tolerance of mirrored pools, nor does it provide the easier recovery of parity-powered layouts. The worst part? It actually increases the chances of data loss!

You’ll lose all data when a drive kicks the bucket

Remember how I said RAID 0 splits your files between different drives? While this distributed nature increases the speed of read/write operations, it also means you’re more likely to lose your data in case a drive dies suddenly – and the risk of your entire storage pool becoming irrecoverable scales up as you add more drives to the setup. Throw in the fact that there aren’t redundant copies or parity bits for your RAID 0 configuration, and you’ll be in quite the pinch if (or rather when) a drive breaks down.

RAID 10 is better if you want performance

You can even go for RAID 5 on a cheaper setup

Although the higher RAID levels may not offer the same speeds as RAID 0, the ones featuring some form of striped data can still improve performance when transferring files. Take RAID 10, for instance, which combines the mirrored setup of RAID 1 with the superior speeds of RAID 0. Although it requires at least four drives, RAID 10 creates two pairs of mirrored disks and splits the files between them.

Alternatively, you can go for a RAID 5 configuration, which reduces the number of minimum drives to three while offering slightly slower speeds than its RAID 10 counterpart. Rather than relying on mirrored drives, RAID 5 spreads the data across different drives in addition to storing parity bits for easier recovery. Regardless of which setup you go with, RAID 5 and RAID 10 are significantly more reliable than RAID 0.

RAID 0 isn't the only way to boost your transfer speeds

If you’re still dissatisfied with the performance of your storage pools, there are a couple of tricks that let you enhance file transfer operations. For NAS setups, enabling RAM caching can give a major oomph to your file-sharing workload, but you’ll need enough memory in the server. There’s also SMB multichannel, which lets you aggregate multiple network ports to increase transfer speeds between a client-server pair, though it has a rather convoluted setup procedure.