"Far" layout is designed for offering striping performance on a mirrored array; sequential reads can be striped, as in RAID 0 configurations. Random reads are somewhat faster, while sequential and random writes offer about equal speed to other mirrored RAID configurations. "Far" layout performs well for systems in which reads are more frequent than writes, which is a common case. For a comparison, regular RAID 1 as provided by Linux software RAID, does not stripe reads, but can perform reads in parallel.