Mark Hahn wrote:
15 drives and 64K chunks gives 960K per stripe.
The raid0 code should set the read-ahead to twice that: 1920K
which I would have thought would be enough, but apparently not.

choosing the RA size should depend in some way on speed, shouldn't it?
after all, the goal is to have enough reads queued to avoid a "stall"
while un-read-ahead-ed sectors pass under the head.  for a typical
60 MB/s, 7200 rpm disk, a track is .5 MB. the heuristic above only reads ahead .12 MB...

While I'm sure you realize it, some reader won't, so I'll point out that a cylinder is all the tracks which can be read without a seek, and cylinder size is track size times number of data heads. If you want max speed you can read that much off a drive at a time...

hmm. I certainly agree with your terminology, but afaikt, disks only read
from a head at a time.  the last time I saw a vendor quoting head-switch
times, they were within a factor of two one-track seek times, which explains why a same-family disk with more heads/surfaces shows only slight speedup.
Agreed. The only real gain is avoiding intervening seeks. Makes a case for using cylinder size as chunk size? Maybe. Makes a case for being sure your readahead is large enough, though, for some sensible value of "enough."

--
bill davidsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 CTO TMR Associates, Inc
 Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979

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