Aside from the slowness of any networked file system protocol,
AFS and NFS both choke at the 2 Gb barrier.
Besides which, you'll really thrash your cache if you try to access that
file sequentially through afs.
BTW, what made you think RAID is necessarily slow? It can be
if poorly implemented or if you can't select simple striping
without parity drives.
I guess I don't think of it as RAID without the parity drives. But even
with full redundancy, reading data from a proper RAID should be fast, it's
writing that will be slow. Depending on what you use the files for, this
might be ok in some applications (unchanging census data, for example).
In fact, I think the answer to your question really depends on the
application. If you always access that 6 Gb file read-only and
sequentially, then a simple streaming tape drive or optical storage might be
best. If it's read-write random access, you'll have to go with some kind of
disk striping, I think.
