However, RAID-0 arrays deliver the best performance and data storage efficiency of any array type. Writes must go to both drives in a mirrored pair so that the information on the drives is kept identical. Each individual drive, however, can perform simultaneous read operations. Mirroring thus doubles the read performance of an individual drive and leaves the write performance unchanged. RAID-3 relies on the embedded ECC in each sector for error detection.
Records typically span all drives, thereby optimizing data intensive environments.
However, since all write operations must update the parity drive, they cannot be overlapped. This architecture offers no significant advantages over RAID-5. However, unlike RAID-4, each drive takes turns storing parity information for a different series of stripes. Since there is no dedicated parity drive, all drives contain data and read operations can be overlapped on every drive in the array. Write operations will typically access a single data drive, plus the parity drive for that record.