User`s manual

Appendices
Striping
Also called RAID 0. A method of distributing data evenly across
all drives in an array by concatenating interleaved stripes from each
drive.
Stripe Size
(A.k.a. “chunk size.”) The smallest block of data read from or
written to a physical drive. Modern hardware implementations let
users tune this block to the typical access patterns of the most
common system applications.
Stripe Width
The number of physical drives used for a stripe. As a rule, the
wider the stripe, the better the performance.
Write-back Cache
Many modern disk controllers have several megabytes of cache on
board. Onboard cache gives the controller greater freedom in
scheduling reads and writes to disks attached to the controller. In
write-back mode, the controller reports a write operation as
complete as soon as the data is in the cache. This sequence
improves write performance at the expense of reliability. Power
failures or system crashes can result in lost data in the cache,
possibly corrupting the file system.
Write-through Cache
The opposite of write-back. When running in a write-through
mode, the controller will not report a write as complete until it is
written to the disk drives. This sequence reduces read/write
performance by forcing the controller to suspend an operation
while it satisfies the write request.
Glossary App-11