singledisk

Singledisk is a term used in information technology to denote a storage setup that relies on a single disk as the primary storage device for a volume or virtual machine, without built-in redundancy such as mirroring or parity-based RAID. It is commonly encountered in embedded systems, small desktop deployments, and development or testing environments where simplicity, low cost, and reduced hardware footprint are priorities.

A singledisk configuration typically offers straightforward management and predictable performance tied to the capabilities of the single drive. However, the lack of redundancy means there is no automatic protection against disk failure. Reliability is therefore highly dependent on external backup strategies or separate off-site replication. Workloads that can tolerate potential downtime or data loss are more suitable for singledisk deployments, while critical data usually requires additional protective measures.

Common mitigations include regular backups, snapshots, versioned recovery, or keeping important data on an independent storage tier that is not tied to the single primary disk. In practice, singledisk can be used as the boot or data disk in a virtual machine, a simple physical disk in an edge device, or a temporary storage medium in a test environment.

Related concepts include JBOD, non-redundant storage, RAID (for redundancy), and various backup and disaster recovery strategies. See also storage virtualization and container or VM disk provisioning practices.