On 11/22/2013 5:07 PM, NeilBrown wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Nov 2013 16:57:48 -0600 Stan Hoeppner <s...@hardwarefreak.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 11/21/2013 1:05 AM, John Williams wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 10:52 PM, Stan Hoeppner <s...@hardwarefreak.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>> On 11/20/2013 8:46 PM, John Williams wrote:
>>>>> For myself or any machines I managed for work that do not need high
>>>>> IOPS, I would definitely choose triple- or quad-parity over RAID 51 or
>>>>> similar schemes with arrays of 16 - 32 drives.
>>>>
>>>> You must see a week long rebuild as acceptable...
>>>
>>> It would not be a problem if it did take that long, since I would have
>>> extra parity units as backup in case of a failure during a rebuild.
>>>
>>> But of course it would not take that long. Take, for example, a 24 x
>>> 3TB triple-parity array (21+3) that has had two drive failures
>>> (perhaps the rebuild started with one failure, but there was soon
>>> another failure). I would expect the rebuild to take about a day.
>>
>> You're looking at today.  We're discussing tomorrow's needs.  Today's
>> 6TB 3.5" drives have sustained average throughput of ~175MB/s.
>> Tomorrow's 20TB drives will be lucky to do 300MB/s.  As I said
>> previously, at that rate a straight disk-disk copy of a 20TB drive takes
>> 18.6 hours.  This is what you get with RAID1/10/51.  In the real world,
>> rebuilding a failed drive in a 3P array of say 8 of these disks will
>> likely take at least 3 times as long, 2 days 6 hours minimum, probably
>> more.  This may be perfectly acceptable to some, but probably not to all.
> 
> Could you explain your logic here?  Why do you think rebuilding parity
> will take 3 times as long as rebuilding a copy?  Can you measure that sort of
> difference today?

I've not performed head-to-head timed rebuild tests of mirror vs parity
RAIDs.  I'm making the elapsed guess for parity RAIDs based on posts
here over the past ~3 years, in which many users reported 16-24+ hour
rebuild times for their fairly wide (12-16 1-2TB drive) RAID6 arrays.

This is likely due to their chosen rebuild priority and concurrent user
load during rebuild.  Since this seems to be the norm, instead of giving
100% to the rebuild, I thought it prudent to take this into account,
instead of the theoretical minimum rebuild time.

> Presumably when we have 20TB drives we will also have more cores and quite
> possibly dedicated co-processors which will make the CPU load less
> significant.

But (when) will we have the code to fully take advantage of these?  It's
nearly 2014 and we still don't have a working threaded write model for
levels 5/6/10, though maybe soon.  Multi-core mainstream x86 CPUs have
been around for 8 years now, SMP and ccNUMA systems even longer.  So the
need has been there for a while.

I'm strictly making an observation (possibly not fully accurate) here.
I am not casting stones.  I'm not a programmer and am thus unable to
contribute code, only ideas and troubleshooting assistance for fellow
users.  Ergo I have no right/standing to complain about the rate of
feature progress.  I know that everyone hacking md is making the most of
the time they have available.  So again, not a complaint, just an
observation.

-- 
Stan
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