The ideal stripe unit size for data-transfer-intensive applications that use a striped volume is the typical I/O request size of the application, divided by the number of data disks in the stripe. For example, if an application typically makes requests for 256 KB, an ideal stripe size for a four-disk striped volume would be 64 KB (256 KB/4).

Data-transfer-intensive applications typically request a large amount of data with every request, between 64 KB and 1 MB, or more. When a large amount of data is requested, the data-transfer phase of the request represents the majority of the request execution time. Thus, reducing data-transfer time improves I/O performance.

A single disk can transfer data only as fast as the data passes under the disk's read-write head. For example, a disk that rotates at 10,000 RPM and has 200 blocks on a certain track cannot transfer data to or from that track any faster than 17.06 MB per second (200 blocks x 512 bytes per block/0.006 seconds per revolution). An application request for 500 KB would require five platter revolutions, or 30 milliseconds, to execute. If the request were addressed to a volume of five identical disks created with SFW, each disk would ideally deliver one-fifth of the data, and the request would complete in a shorter time.

In general, if a striped volume is optimized for data-transfer-intensive applications, each application I/O request will split evenly across all of the volume's disks (or all but the disk containing parity data in the case of a RAID-5 volume).