RAID 0 Calculator
RAID 0 stripes data across all disks with zero redundancy — every byte of raw capacity becomes usable, at the cost of losing everything if any single disk fails.
The RAID 0 formula
Usable Capacity = N × Disk Size (100% efficiency)
There's no parity or mirroring overhead — a 4-disk array of 2 TB drives gives you the full 8 TB. This is the only RAID level where raw and usable capacity are identical.
Worked example
4 disks × 2 TB = 8 TB usable, 100% storage efficiency, 0 disks of fault tolerance. Read and write speeds both scale roughly linearly with disk count, since every disk works in parallel on every operation.
When RAID 0 actually makes sense
Only for data you can afford to lose entirely, or that's disposable by nature: video editing scratch disks, render farm temp storage, cache volumes, or benchmark/test environments. Losing any single disk in the array destroys all data on every disk — there is no partial recovery.
Why is RAID 0 not safe for important data?
Because data is striped in small chunks across every disk with no redundancy — losing one disk means every file in the array is missing pieces, effectively destroying all of it, not just the data that happened to be on that disk.
Does adding more disks to RAID 0 increase risk?
Yes — the annual failure probability of the array roughly scales with disk count, since any single disk failing takes down the whole array. An 8-disk RAID 0 array is roughly twice as likely to fail in a given year as a 4-disk one.
Need a different RAID level? Use the full RAID Calculator covering RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 and ZFS RAIDZ1/2/3, or read the RAID levels comparison guide.