Data Striping and Disk Striping

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 inredundant array of independent disks (RAID) storage, network interface controllers, different computers in clustered file systems and grid-oriented storage, and RAM in some systems.

Disk Striping

In computers that use multiple hard disk systems, disk striping is the process of dividing a body of data into blocks and spreading the data blocks across several partitions on several hard disks. Each stripe is the size of the smallest partition.