On Dec 4, 2007 1:49 PM, Aaron Kulkis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Chris Worley wrote:
> > On Dec 4, 2007 10:22 AM, Jc Polanycia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>> Off topic, as I seldom partition anything (unpartitioned drives
> >>> perform best), but, you're setting yourself up for disaster using LVM
> >>> (any corruption to the LVM layer is not recoverable... you'll loose
> >>> everything... been there done that), and the performance is poor, and
> >>> MD RAID5/6 devices can be grown (add more disks).
> >>>
> >>> Chris
> >>>
> >> Fair enough.  I appreciate the input because I haven't run across any
> >> real-world stories about LVM corruption.  I have personally encountered
> >> corruption problems with RAID5/6 as well as problems with decreased
> >> performance as a RAID5 structure gets more members added to it.
> >
> > I saw some RAID6 issues last year, so I use RAID5... but recent tests
> > have shown MD RAID6 as solid.
> >
> > "Decreased performance as more members get added to it"?  Bull!!!  I'm
> > guessing you have another bottleneck that has led you to this
> > conclusion.
> >
> > While the performance increase doesn't scale linearly as disks are
> > added (some CPU verhead is added with each additional drive), the more
> > disks, the better the performance.  I'm sure there is some Amdahl's
> > law limit to the increased performance scalability, but I run RAIDS up
> > to 12 drives, and see performance added w/ each new member.
> >
>
> You're hallucinating.  That defies basic information theory.
>
> Your assertion is akin to suggesting that you power your
> computers with a perpetual motion machine (despite the
> fact that such would violate the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd laws
> of thermodynamics).

Single threaded access to a raid array may not be helped by adding
drives.  Drive access can end up being sequential and your not really
buying anything.

Multi-threaded storage performance is definitely positively affected
by adding disks to an array.

For multi-threaded, effectively each disk can do N IOPS  (IOs per Second.)

So if you have M drives, you can do M*N IOPS.

The trouble with Raid 5 is that it typically requires 4 IOs to update
a single sector.

ie.
Read checksum,
Read original sector,  (so you can remove it from the checksum)
write updated sector
write new checksum.

So it ends up being M*N / 4  IOPS.

So from a performance perspective on _writes_  you need at least a 4
drive array just to be as fast as a single disk.

Reads OTOH just need to read the sector they want (unless you have a
failed drive).

So _read_ performance is M*N.  Or always faster than a single drive.

Greg
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