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Date:      Sun, 1 Feb 1998 11:59:38 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Karl Denninger <karl@mcs.net>
Cc:        Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@americantv.com>, Brian Tao <taob@nbc.netcom.ca>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: RAID controllers - folks, check this thing out
Message-ID:  <19980201115938.38542@lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <19980131185203.60841@mcs.net>; from Karl Denninger on Sat, Jan 31, 1998 at 06:52:03PM -0600
References:  <19980131144604.03410@mcs.net> <Pine.GSO.3.95.980131161942.27817Z-100000@tor-adm1> <19980131155527.19192@mcs.net> <19980131160423.30536@right.PCS> <19980131185203.60841@mcs.net>

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On Sat, Jan 31, 1998 at 06:52:03PM -0600, Karl Denninger wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 1998 at 04:04:24PM -0600, Jonathan Lemon wrote:
>> On Jan 01, 1998 at 03:55:27PM -0600, Karl Denninger wrote:
>>> RAID 5, due to the way it stripes parity across the volumes, has a "sweet
>>> spot" in performance at 5 spindles.
>>
>> This is only true if your stripe set is 4 spindles.  There's nothing
>> wrong with using a stripe set of 8 spindles (9 devices), except that
>> it tends to make small writes slower, since your data is spread out
>> over more devices.
>>
>> 5 devices is not an inherent property of RAID 5, AFAIK.
>> --
>> Jonathan
>
> The trade-off, however, between slowing down write performance, parity
> computation, stripe size, etc seems to be right around 5 spindles.

You can't say this without making assumptions about the nature of your
access.  What if it's 99.9% read access?  What if it's 60% write
access?

Greg



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