RAID 0, also called striping, divides your data into chunks and spreads them across two or more hard drives or SSDs. Because read and write operations happen in parallel across all drives, you get faster performance than a single drive could offer.
How it works: imagine a 100 MB file. With RAID 0 across two drives, 50 MB goes to drive 1 and 50 MB to drive 2. Your computer reads both at once, so the transfer completes roughly twice as fast.
The critical downside is redundancy. RAID 0 provides zero fault tolerance. If any single drive fails, you lose the entire array and all your data becomes unrecoverable. A failed drive means the other drives hold incomplete file fragments with no way to reconstruct them.
Real-world scenario: a video editor working with 4K footage might use RAID 0 to handle the huge file sizes and fast render times. But they would back up their project files separately, because RAID 0 is not a backup solution.
When considering RAID 0: choose it only if you prioritise speed over safety, and only for non-critical work. You should always maintain separate backups on different media. RAID 0 works best for temporary storage, caches, or scratch disks where losing data is inconvenient but not catastrophic. For important files, choose RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 5 (striping with parity) instead.