Striping improves access performance by cutting data into slices and storing it on multiple devices that can be accessed in parallel. Striped plexes improve access performance for both read and write operations.

After you identify the most heavily-accessed volumes (containing file systems or databases), you can increase access bandwidth to this data by striping it across portions of multiple disks.

Figure: Use of striping for optimal data access shows an example of a single volume (HotVol) that has been identified as a data-access bottleneck.

This volume is striped across four disks. The remaining space on these disks is free for use by less-heavily used volumes.