I have read anecdotes about people installing RAID0 (RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) on some of their machines because it gives a performance boost. Because bandwidth on the motherboard is limited, can someone explain exactly why it should be faster?
Take a look at this link. I think it will help explain your question.
RAID = Blazing fast Hard Drive performance / Infopackets.com
Thank you for your response, but my question is not so much the observation that it faster but why. Why should RAID0 be faster than a single disk?
A typical computer system consists of one hard drive which uses only a single channel of communication to transfer data. On a RAID-0 system which uses multiple channels to transfer information, data is transferred twice as fast. This significantly increases data read and write speeds.
HTH
What do you mean 'the bandwidth on the motherboard is limited'? There's a limit to anything, but if it can keep up with two disks, there will be a benefit.
Consider the following.
You want to fill up your backyard pool (the data) with a regular garden hose (the disk controller). Unfortunately the hose does not reach the pool. So you decide to fill up a pail (the disk) and carry it to the pool, empty the pail and carry it back. Now you have to turn off the hose every time that you fill the pail. If you add pails and carriers (RAID0), you need just enough of these so that when one pail is filled, the next pail arrives back from the pool just in time to not spill any water, or have to turn the tap off.
Thank you for your answers. It is the parallelism over the wire from the disk to memory that was not clear to me.
Ah. Most disk and memory busses are far faster than the disks attached. Disks transfer in quick bursts and don't monopolize the bus.