Janek Kozicki wrote:
writing on raid10 is supposed to be half the speed of reading. That's
because it must write to both mirrors.


I am not 100% certain about the following rules, but afaik any raid configuration has a theoretical[1] maximum read speed of the combined speed of all disks in the array and a maximum write speed equal to the combined speed of a disk-length of a stripe. By disk-length I mean how many disks are needed to reconstruct a single stripe - the rest of the writes are redundancy and are essentially non-accountable work. For raid5 it is N-1. For raid6 - N-2. For linux raid 10 it is N-C+1 where C is the number of chunk copies. So for -p n3 -n 5 we would get a maximum write speed of 3 x <single drive speed>. For raid1 the disk-length of a stripe is always 1.

So the statement
IMHO raid5 could perform good here, because in *continuous* write
operation the blocks from other HDDs were just have been written,
they stay in cache and can be used to calculate xor. So you could get
close to almost raid-0 performance here.
is quite incorrect. You will get close to raid-0 if you have many disks, but will never beat raid0, since once disk is always busy writing parity which is not part of the write request submitted to the mdX device in the first place.

[1] Theoretical since any external factors (busy CPU, unsuitable elevator, random disk access, multiple raid levels on one physical device) would all contribute to take you further away from the maximums.
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