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Using striped volumes

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Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Using striped volumes

Striped volumes are created by combining areas of free space on two or more disks into one logical volume. Striped volumes use RAID-0, which stripes data across multiple disks. Striped volumes cannot be extended or mirrored, and do not offer fault tolerance. If one of the disks containing a striped volume fails, the entire volume fails. When creating striped volumes, it is best to use disks that are the same size, model, and manufacturer.

With a striped volume, data is divided into blocks and spread in a fixed order among all the disks in the array, similar to spanned volumes. Striping writes files across all disks so that data is added to all disks at the same rate.

Despite their lack of fault tolerance, striped volumes offer the best performance of all the Windows disk management strategies and provide increased I/O performance by distributing I/O requests across disks. For example, striped volumes offer improved performance when:

  • Reading from or writing to large databases.

  • Collecting data from external sources at very high transfer rates.

  • Loading program images, dynamic-link libraries (DLLs), or run-time libraries.

MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millinnium Edition, Windows NT 4.0, Windows XP Home Edition, and other operating systems lacking dynamic storage capability cannot recognize any striped volumes created by Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional, or Windows Server 2003 operating systems. Therefore, if you create a striped volume on a dual-boot computer, that volume becomes unusable by those operating systems.

For instructions on creating a striped volume, see Create a striped volume.