RAID 0 Failure- The Dangers of Using RAID 0

RAID 0 is a very popular RAID level that is not only used in servers, but also found in external devices including network attached storage units (NAS). Manufacturers of these external units use RAID 0 to increase the storage capacity of their units to consumers. While RAID 0 has its benefits, it is not fault tolerant. The loss of one disk can cause the loss of all data stored across the array because RAID 0 stripes without parity. Striping writes data in chunks of the same size across each member disk in the array. All members of the array must be functioning in order to retrieve the data in its proper format. If only one RAID 0 disk fails, the data cannot be properly retrieved.

If you are using RAID 0 in a server, or if you are using a large capacity external storage device- please make sure you perform regular backups of your data to prevent data loss from RAID 0 failure.