Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-27 Thread Bill Moran
In response to Mark Mielke [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Bill Moran wrote: What do you mean heard of? Which raid system do you know of that reads all drives for RAID 1? I'm fairly sure that FreeBSD's GEOM does. Of course, it couldn't be doing consistency checking at that point.

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-27 Thread Mark Mielke
Bill Moran wrote: In response to Mark Mielke [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Bill Moran wrote: I'm fairly sure that FreeBSD's GEOM does. Of course, it couldn't be doing consistency checking at that point. According to this:

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-27 Thread Bill Moran
In response to Mark Mielke [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Bill Moran wrote: In response to Mark Mielke [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Bill Moran wrote: I'm fairly sure that FreeBSD's GEOM does. Of course, it couldn't be doing consistency checking at that point. According to this:

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-27 Thread Jean-David Beyer
Shane Ambler wrote: I achieve something closer to +20% - +60% over the theoretical performance of a single disk with my four disk RAID 1+0 partitions. If a good 4 disk SATA RAID 1+0 can achieve 60% more throughput than a single SATA disk, what sort of percentage can be achieved from a

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-27 Thread Vivek Khera
On Dec 26, 2007, at 10:21 AM, Bill Moran wrote: I snipped the rest of your message because none of it matters. Never use RAID 5 on a database system. Ever. There is absolutely NO reason to every put yourself through that much suffering. If you hate yourself that much just commit suicide,

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-27 Thread Vivek Khera
On Dec 26, 2007, at 4:28 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: now, if you can afford solid-state drives which don't have noticable seek times, things are completely different ;-) Who makes one with infinite lifetime? The only ones I know of are built using RAM and have disk drive backup with

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Bill Moran
RAID 10. I snipped the rest of your message because none of it matters. Never use RAID 5 on a database system. Ever. There is absolutely NO reason to every put yourself through that much suffering. If you hate yourself that much just commit suicide, it's less drastic. -- Bill Moran

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Greg Smith
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Mark Mielke wrote: I believe hardware RAID 5 is also horrible, but since the hardware hides it from the application, a hardware RAID 5 user might not care. Typically anything doing hardware RAID 5 also has a reasonable sized write cache on the controller, which softens

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Fernando Hevia
Mark Mielke Wrote: In my experience, software RAID 5 is horrible. Write performance can decrease below the speed of one disk on its own, and read performance will not be significantly more than RAID 1+0 as the number of stripes has only increased from 2 to 3, and if reading while writing, you

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Fernando Hevia
Bill Moran wrote: RAID 10. I snipped the rest of your message because none of it matters. Never use RAID 5 on a database system. Ever. There is absolutely NO reason to every put yourself through that much suffering. If you hate yourself that much just commit suicide, it's less

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread david
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Fernando Hevia wrote: Mark Mielke Wrote: In my experience, software RAID 5 is horrible. Write performance can decrease below the speed of one disk on its own, and read performance will not be significantly more than RAID 1+0 as the number of stripes has only increased

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Fernando Hevia
David Lang Wrote: with only four drives the space difference between raid 1+0 and raid 5 isn't that much, but when you do a write you must write to two drives (the drive holding the data you are changing, and the drive that holds the parity data for that stripe, possibly needing to read

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Florian Weimer
seek/read/calculate/seek/write since the drive moves on after the read), when you read you must read _all_ drives in the set to check the data integrity. I don't know of any RAID implementation that performs consistency checking on each read operation. 8-( ---(end of

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Bill Moran
In response to Fernando Hevia [EMAIL PROTECTED]: David Lang Wrote: with only four drives the space difference between raid 1+0 and raid 5 isn't that much, but when you do a write you must write to two drives (the drive holding the data you are changing, and the drive that holds the

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread david
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Fernando Hevia wrote: David Lang Wrote: with only four drives the space difference between raid 1+0 and raid 5 isn't that much, but when you do a write you must write to two drives (the drive holding the data you are changing, and the drive that holds the parity data for

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread david
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Florian Weimer wrote: seek/read/calculate/seek/write since the drive moves on after the read), when you read you must read _all_ drives in the set to check the data integrity. I don't know of any RAID implementation that performs consistency checking on each read

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Mark Mielke
Florian Weimer wrote: seek/read/calculate/seek/write since the drive moves on after the read), when you read you must read _all_ drives in the set to check the data integrity. I don't know of any RAID implementation that performs consistency checking on each read operation. 8-( Dave

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread david
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Mark Mielke wrote: Florian Weimer wrote: seek/read/calculate/seek/write since the drive moves on after the read), when you read you must read _all_ drives in the set to check the data integrity. I don't know of any RAID implementation that performs consistency checking

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Mark Mielke
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Mark Mielke wrote: Florian Weimer wrote: seek/read/calculate/seek/write since the drive moves on after the read), when you read you must read _all_ drives in the set to check the data integrity. I don't know of any RAID implementation that

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Mark Mielke
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I could see a raid 1 array not doing consistancy checking (after all, it has no way of knowing what's right if it finds an error), but since raid 5/6 can repair the data I would expect them to do the checking each time. Your messages are spread across the thread. :-)

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Mark Mielke
Bill Moran wrote: In order to recalculate the parity, it has to have data from all disks. Thus, if you have 4 disks, it has to read 2 (the unknown data blocks included in the parity calculation) then write 2 (the new data block and the new parity data) Caching can help some, but if your data

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Bill Moran
In response to Mark Mielke [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Mark Mielke wrote: Florian Weimer wrote: seek/read/calculate/seek/write since the drive moves on after the read), when you read you must read _all_ drives in the set to check the data

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Bill Moran
In response to Mark Mielke [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Bill Moran wrote: In order to recalculate the parity, it has to have data from all disks. Thus, if you have 4 disks, it has to read 2 (the unknown data blocks included in the parity calculation) then write 2 (the new data block and the new

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread david
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Mark Mielke wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for the explanation David. It's good to know not only what but also why. Still I wonder why reads do hit all drives. Shouldn't only 2 disks be read: the one with the data and the parity disk? no, becouse the parity is of

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Mark Mielke
Bill Moran wrote: What do you mean heard of? Which raid system do you know of that reads all drives for RAID 1? I'm fairly sure that FreeBSD's GEOM does. Of course, it couldn't be doing consistency checking at that point. According to this:

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread david
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Mark Mielke wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I could see a raid 1 array not doing consistancy checking (after all, it has no way of knowing what's right if it finds an error), but since raid 5/6 can repair the data I would expect them to do the checking each time. Your

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Mark Mielke
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for the explanation David. It's good to know not only what but also why. Still I wonder why reads do hit all drives. Shouldn't only 2 disks be read: the one with the data and the parity disk? no, becouse the parity is of the sort (A+B+C+P) mod X = 0 so if X=10

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread david
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Mark Mielke wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Mark Mielke wrote: Florian Weimer wrote: seek/read/calculate/seek/write since the drive moves on after the read), when you read you must read _all_ drives in the set to check the data integrity. I don't

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Mark Mielke
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: however I was addressing the point that for reads you can't do any checking until you have read in all the blocks. if you never check the consistency, how will it ever be proven otherwise. A scheme often used is to mark the disk/slice as clean during clean system

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Greg Smith
On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: yes, the two linux software implementations only read from one disk, but I have seen hardware implementations where it reads from both drives, and if they disagree it returns a read error rather then possibly invalid data (it's up to the admin to

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Greg Smith
On Thu, 27 Dec 2007, Shane Ambler wrote: So in theory a modern RAID 1 setup can be configured to get similar read speeds as RAID 0 but would still drop to single disk speeds (or similar) when writing, but RAID 0 can get the faster write performance. The trick is, you need a perfect

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Mark Mielke
Shane Ambler wrote: So in theory a modern RAID 1 setup can be configured to get similar read speeds as RAID 0 but would still drop to single disk speeds (or similar) when writing, but RAID 0 can get the faster write performance. Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that. RAID 1 has

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Shane Ambler
Mark Mielke wrote: Shane Ambler wrote: So in a perfect setup (probably 1+0) 4x 300MB/s SATA drives could deliver 1200MB/s of data to RAM, which is also assuming that all 4 channels have their own data path to RAM and aren't sharing. (anyone know how segregated the on board controllers such as

Re: [PERFORM] With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10

2007-12-26 Thread Shane Ambler
Greg Smith wrote: On Thu, 27 Dec 2007, Shane Ambler wrote: So in theory a modern RAID 1 setup can be configured to get similar read speeds as RAID 0 but would still drop to single disk speeds (or similar) when writing, but RAID 0 can get the faster write performance. The trick is, you need