I know a few of you may have fun weighing in on an interesting
proposal and a few implied questions. My son sent this to me, asking
for a relay to folks who can help. My Apple Mail was initially set to
Helvetica font, so I first copied his message to TextEdit to view the
graphic in Courier.
Here it is:
QUOTE
[!!! View this message with COURIER font to display images
appropriately!!!]
Dad --
I am going to be doing more research on the matter of using the
Disk Utility's software RAID 0 and 1 in a Mac Pro environment, but
wanted to get your opinions on the matter. I am mostly worried about
disk performance in a software RAID environment, especially when
mirroring is active. Below is a graphical and textual interpretation
of what I intend to do.
In short, the goal of this setup is to stripe the boot and the home
partitions, yet provide a non-striped disk partition to which they
mirror for backup. As such, the goal is to obtain all the benefits of
stripped access speeds, yet provide a level of fallback if the
stripped disks were to fail. For /home, I would take two 512GB
partitions on separate disks for a stripe, then utilize the entirety
of a 1TB disk for the mirror.
In Solaris there were ways to not execute the mirror updates
immediately, but rather on the hour, or once every midnight or so --
thus providing the mirror to be close to the original as good enough
for backups and solutions sake, yet not interfering with the speed
boost of a stripped array. NeXTSTEP had this too if I remember
right. If I could locate that in the MacOS environment, it'd be the
direction I'd go in.
The final option I may look at is to see if there are hardware RAID
cards for the Mac Pro which do not require re-ribboning the backplane
for access to the SATA drives; that could provide two-channel striping/
mirroring of the same environment -- or better, a RAID-5 across 3
disks for /home, a non-RAID boot disk, and a non-RAID Vista partition.
Let me know if you have any thoughts; or feel free to pass this
thought thread around to others for feedback.
+===========+ +===========+ +===========+ +===========+
| A1 | | B1 | | C1 | | D1 |
| /root | | /root | | | | |
| 256G R0+1 | | 256G R0+1 | | | | |
| | | | | | | |
+===========+ +===========+ | /root | | |
| A2 | | B2 | | 512G R1 | | |
| | | | | | | |
| MISC R0 | | MISC R0 | | | | |
| | | | | | | /home |
+===========+ +===========+ +===========+ | 1TB R1 |
| A3 | | B3 | | C2 | | |
| | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | |
| | | | | Windows | | |
| /home | | /home | | Vista | | |
| 512G R0+1 | | 512G R0+1 | | | | |
| | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | |
+===========+ +===========+ +===========+ +===========+
/root
mirror (stripe[A1 (256GB slice) + B1 (256GB slice)] + C1 (512GB slice))
/home
mirror (stripe[A3 (512GB slice) + B3 (512GB slice)] + D1 (1TB slice))
Scratch
stripe[A2 (256GB slice) + B2 (256GB slice)]
Bootcamp Vista
Partition[C2]
UNQUOTE
Thank you for any comments.
Al Poulin
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