On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 04:42:59PM -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote: > Again this was on a decent HW raid so seek penalties are probably not > too bad. You may want to verify that by doing a benchmark on the raw device. I recently did some benchmarks doing random I/O on a Dell 2850 w/ a PERC (megaraid) RAID5 w/ 128MB onboard writeback cache and 6x 15krpm drives and noticed appoximately one order of magnitude throughput drop on small (stripe-sized) random reads versus linear. It maxed out at ~100 random read IOPs or "seeks/sec" (suprisingly low). Out of curiousity, how are you counting the seeks? Shapor - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html