RAID-0e: A Resilient Striping Array Architecture for Balanced Performance and Availability

2025-10-14

AI Summary

Traditional RAID 0 suffers from catastrophic array-wide data loss due to localized media failures—such as isolated bad blocks or transient read errors—compromising availability and resilience. This paper proposes RAID-0e, a lightweight fault-tolerant enhancement architecture that preserves native RAID 0’s read performance while introducing cross-disk redundancy. RAID-0e achieves this via logically separated data and dedicated parity domains, enabling fine-grained, sector- or stripe-level failure handling. Crucially, it embeds failure-response logic directly at the storage layer and employs failure-mode-driven, lightweight fault tolerance—eliminating costly global reconstruction. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that RAID-0e sustains >95% of RAID 0’s read throughput while reducing data loss risk from media degradation by an order of magnitude. Consequently, it significantly improves storage system availability and operational resilience without sacrificing performance.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML

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• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-modal RAG
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel disk array architecture, designated RAID-0e (Resilient Striping Array), designed to superimpose a low-overhead fault tolerance layer upon traditional RAID 0 (striping). By employing a logically and physically separate parity domain to protect a primary data domain, RAID-0e mitigates the risk of array-wide data loss from common, non-catastrophic media failures, such as isolated bad blocks, transient read errors, or sector-level corruption. The architecture is engineered to preserve the intrinsic read performance advantages of RAID 0 while significantly enhancing data availability and operational resilience. This document provides a comprehensive exposition of the architectural principles, operational workflows, performance characteristics, failure mode analysis, and security considerations of RAID-0e. It is presented as an experimental yet pragmatic solution for environments seeking a new equilibrium between I/O performance, storage cost, and data resilience, particularly where full drive failure is a secondary concern to media degradation.

Problem

• Balancing performance and availability in disk array architectures
• Mitigating data loss from non-catastrophic media failures
• Providing fault tolerance while preserving RAID 0 performance

Innovation

• Superimposes fault tolerance layer on RAID-0 striping
• Uses separate parity domain to protect data domain
• Preserves RAID-0 read performance while enhancing resilience