On Tue, Feb 18 '03 at 14:57, Alexy Khrabrov wrote: > I'm using a SCSI enclosure with 4 drives to store large files > and wonder whether to stripe a single LV spanning them and > how to choose the size of the stripe? Don't. Use RAID5 and just don't bother to use striping. Otherwise, when one drive fails all your data will be lost, with no hope to recover it. OTOH if you insist on striping, than use a stripe size, that fits a few times (3-4) into the cache of your disks. That would allow the SCSI system to issue a "disk 1: get chunk A", "d2: cB", "d3: cC", "d4: cD" and than read the chunks fro the disk's cache while the other drives are still busy fatching the chunks from disk (and there is still space in the cach to request the next chunk before getting the last, and don't forget some space for writing and the disks' house keeping). If you use XFS just use the chunk size your XFS uses. (and replace chunk with strip size ;-)) -- Goetz Bock (c) 2003 as blacknet.de - Munich - Germany /"\ IT Consultant GNU FDL 1.1 secure mobile Linux everNETting \ / X ASCII Ribbon Campaign against HTML email & microsoft attachments / \ _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/