In this recent years technology has changes at a dramatic pace: memory, processor speed and memory size have grown over past few years. Likewise processor and memory improving, it surpass the improvements of disk speeds and more application become I/O limited. Especially if you are working with large files in daily basis, the hard drive may respond slow by making you wait for log time to load and save a particular document. For this type of problem the only way to increase the data rate and Input/output rate from a file system is by striping or distributing the file system over multiple disks. Even With disk striping, you can nearly double the storage performance of your computer in some applications.

Before knowing how to do disk striping let’s know what is disk striping. Disk striping is a method by which data extents to multiple hard drives. All hard drives involved in the stripe set are all together read from and written to. For example, if a striped set of disks consists of three hard drives, then the data will be read and written about three times faster because Windows is distributing the workload among three hard drives. It is wise to create the partitions equal in size to prevent wasting disk space. Each stripe created is part of the stripe set. Disk striping is used with unneeded array of independent disks (RAID). RAID is a storage system that uses multiple disks to store and distribute data. RAID has multiple implementations called “levels,” and a RAID array that only employs disk striping is called “RAID level 0? or simply “RAID 0.” When you use a RAID 0 array, your computer uses two or more hard drives as one logical volume. The RAID controller splits data evenly between all of the physical drives and writes the split data on each drive simultaneously.

There are two types of disk striping: single user and multi-user. Single user disk striping allows multiple hard disks to simultaneously service multiple I/O requests from a single workstation. Multi-user disk striping allows multiple I/O requests from several workstations to be sent to multiple hard disks. This means that while one hard disk is servicing a request from a workstation, another hard disk is handling a separate request from a different workstation.

In windows Xp before you do striping you need to install hard drive as your primary hard drive cannot be included in the striped set because you can only make striped sets on an empty hard drives. There will be minimum two new hard drive need to create striped set and maximum is 32 hard drives in the set. Once it’s done boot windows and log in as the administrator. Then enter DISKMGMT.MSC command at the run prompt to open disk management. After that right click on the located new disks. Select to dynamic disk command from the context menu. When you do, a wizard will open which will verify that you want to convert disk into a dynamic disk. Click yes. When the conversion completes, repeat the process for each disk in the striped set. To create the striped set, right-click in the empty space on one of your new disks and select the New Volume command from the context menu. Windows will then launch the New Volume wizard. When the wizard asks what type of volume that you want to create, select Striped. Then, follow the instructions to complete the wizard. The process involves simply selecting which disks should be included in the striped set. Your striped set is now ready to use.

Creating a striped set is an inexpensive way of considerably increasing performance. This process significantly improves the performance of the computer when reading and writing large files. Video production and audio recording are two professional applications that benefit from this speed boost. Follow this instruction and increase your pc performance.

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