Data striping

In computer data storage, data striping is the technique of segmenting logically sequential data, such as a file, so that consecutive segments are stored on different physical storage devices.

Striping is useful when a processing device requests data more quickly than a single storage device can provide it. By spreading segments across multiple devices which can be accessed concurrently, total data throughput is increased. It is also a useful method for balancing I/O load across an array of disks. Striping is used across disk drives in redundant array of independent disks (RAID) storage, network interface controllers, different computers in clustered file systems and grid-oriented storage, and RAM in some systems.

One method of striping is done by interleaving sequential segments on storage devices in a round-robin fashion from the beginning of the data sequence. This works well for streaming data, but subsequent random accesses will require knowledge of which device contains the data. If the data is stored such that the physical address of each data segment is assigned a 1-to-1 mapping to a particular device, the device to access each segment requested can be calculated from the address without knowing the offset of the data within the full sequence.

Other methods might be employed in which sequential segments are not stored on sequential devices. Such non-sequential interleaving can have benefits in some error correction schemes.

Advantages of striping include performance and throughput. Sequential time interleaving of data accesses allows the lesser data access throughput of each storage devices to be cumulatively multiplied by the number of storage devices employed. Increased throughput allows the data processing device to continue its work without interruption, and thereby finish its procedures more quickly. This is manifested in improved performance of the data processing.

Because different segments of data are kept on different storage devices, the failure of one device causes the corruption of the full data sequence. In effect, the failure rate of the array of storage devices is equal to the sum of the failure rate of each storage device. This disadvantage of striping can be overcome by the storage of redundant information, such as parity, for the purpose of error correction. In such a system, the disadvantage is overcome at the cost of requiring extra storage.

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