Striping

Striping is the practice of dividing data or signals into a sequence of fixed-size units that are written or transmitted across multiple channels or storage devices. The goal is to enable parallelism and improve throughput, while the approach also affects redundancy and resilience depending on the context.

In data storage, striping spreads consecutive data blocks into stripes that are placed across multiple disks. A stripe comprises a fixed number of blocks, defined by the stripe size or stripe width. Reading or writing in parallel to several disks can boost sustained bandwidth, particularly for large, sequential I/O. Striping alone does not provide data redundancy.

In RAID configurations, striping is central to RAID 0, which uses data stripes across all member disks with no parity or mirroring, delivering increased performance at the cost of fault tolerance. Parity-based levels such as RAID 4, RAID 5 and RAID 6 implement striping with parity information distributed across disks, enabling reconstruction of data when a drive fails. The performance benefits depend on stripe size, number of disks, and I/O patterns; improper stripe sizing or misalignment can hurt performance.

Other domains include textiles and fashion, where striping refers to patterns of parallel stripes on fabrics; in biology, many species exhibit striped coloration; in road and airfield design, striping denotes painted lines used to guide traffic or aircraft movement; and in distributed file systems, data interleaving schemes use striping to distribute data across storage pools.