Striping is a function in RAID that distributes data across multiple physical drives. Data can be striped at a bit or block level. Block sizes of data typically range between 4 and 128 KB blocks. Many systems default to 64KB blocks.

Determine the best stripe size

You will first need to determine the average file size that you will be working with on the system. Typically a system that will be working with larger files will have a higher performance with a larger stripe size. Systems with smaller file sizes, such as a database system often have better performance with smaller stripe sizes.

Advantages of disk striping

The main advantage of disk striping is a higher performance of both read and write speeds when compared to a single drive. For example, striping data across three hard disks theoretically would provide three times the speed. If each drive operates at 200 input/output operations per second (IOPS), disk striping could reach up to 600 IOPS for reads and writes of data.