I'm just after conformation (or not!) of something I've done for a long time which I think is right - it certainly seem right, but one of those things I've always wondered about ... When creating an array I allocate drives from alternative controllers with the thought that the OS/system/hardware might be able to better overlap accesses to the devices - but it sort of assumes that the kernel drivers (and/or mdadm) don't re-order accesses to the devices internally (I'm not counting SCSI logical re-ordering here) So. eg. an example I'm working on now - I have a server with 2 external facing SCSI interfaces, and a box with 14 drives on 2 chains - so 7 drives on each interface (I'd prefer less, but it's what I've got - it's a Dell external box) sd{a-g} are on scsi0, and sd{h-n} are on scsi1, so I issue the create command with: mdadm --create /dev/md1 -n14 -l6 \ /dev/sda /dev/sdh \ /dev/sdb /dev/sdi \ etc. I guess benchmarking it would be the way to really test it, but I'm not after performance for this particular box - just after some thoughts as to whether this is the "best" (or not!) way to do things, or if I'm wasting my time doing it this way! Thanks, Gordon - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html