Robin Bowes wrote:
Bill Davidsen wrote:
Robin Bowes wrote:
Bill Davidsen wrote:
There have been several recent threads on the list regarding software
RAID-5 performance. The reference might be updated to reflect the poor
write performance of RAID-5 until/unless significant tuning is done.
Read that as tuning obscure parameters and throwing a lot of memory into
stripe cache. The reasons for hardware RAID should include "performance
of RAID-5 writes is usually much better than software RAID-5 with
default tuning.
Could you point me at a source of documentation describing how to
perform such tuning?
No. There has been a lot of discussion of this topic on this list, and a
trip through the archives of the last 60 days or so will let you pull
out a number of tuning tips which allow very good performance. My
concern was writing large blocks of data, 1MB per write, to RAID-5, and
didn't involve the overhead of small blocks at all, that leads through
other code and behavior.

Actually Bill, I'm running RAID6 (my mistake for not mentioning it
explicitly before) - I found some material relating to RAID5 but nothing
on RAID6.

Are the concepts similar, or is RAID6 a different beast altogether?
You mentioned that before, and I think the concepts covered in the RAID-5 discussion apply to RAID-6 as well. I don't have enough unused drives to really test anything beyond RAID-5, so I have no particular tuning information to share. Testing on system drives introduces too much jitter to trust the results.
Specifically, I have 8x500GB WD STAT drives on a Supermicro PCI-X 8-port
SATA card configured as a single RAID6 array (~3TB available space)
No hot spare(s)?

I'm running RAID6 instead of RAID5+1 - I've had a couple of instances
where a drive has failed in a RAID5+1 array and a second has failed
during the rebuild after the hot-spare had kicked in.
--

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

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Reply via email to