Every time we build the projects or do some IO intensive works, things get slower because of the bottleneck with the disks. Hence if we can avoid writing to/reading from the disk, the productivity increases and there are numerous examples out there with this idea and probably one of well-known example is memcache.
So what can we do about disk IO? If we have to write to the disk in any way, there is a way to improve the situation with raid0. Normally whenever we think about the raid, we tend to think about redundancy but raid0 is not so much about that. What raid0 is doing is striping. According to wiki page, it is defined as follows.
A RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume) splits data evenly across two or more disks (striped) with no parityinformation for redundancy.
In my machine, I happen to have two additional disks and hence my co-worker suggested me to use raid 0 to boost the IO and that is what I did. So how did I do it? It turned out that it is fairly easy to do it on Windows. Here is the steps.
First let us fire up 'Computer Management' by first going to 'Control Panel' and selecting 'Administrative Tools' and finally choosing 'Computer Management' icon. Once you have it running, click 'Disk Management' under 'Storage'. When you do that, you will see all your disks and its partitions and there choose two disks that you want to use for raid0 and right click mouse and you will see the menu as follows.
Choose 'New Striped Volume...' and when you do that, you will be presented a couple of windows to configure the raid0 such as allocating the size of the disk for raid0.
Once you do that, you are done. Yes, I know it is too simple. But that's all it takes. Now when you look at the 'Disk Management' console, you will see something like the following.
I created the raid0 and label it as E: drive and hence I put my source code there so that all the IO work happens there to isolate the IO from other OS or app activities. So if you are a windows user and have some extra disks on your machine, give it a try!
