Bill Davidsen said: (by the date of Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:01:05 -0400) > So I would expect this to make a very large performance difference, so > even if it work it would do so slowly. I was trying to find out the stripe layout for few hours, using hexedit and dd. And I'm baffled: md1 : active raid5 hda3[0] sda3[1] 969907968 blocks super 1.1 level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [UU_] bitmap: 8/8 pages [32KB], 32768KB chunk I fill md1 with random data: # dd bs=128k count=64 if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/md1 # hexedit /dev/md1 I copy/paste (and remove formmatting) the first 32 bytes of /dev/md1, now I search for those 32 bytes in /dev/hda3 and in /dev/sda3: # hexedit /dev/hda3 # hexedit /dev/sda3 And no luck! I'd expect the first bytes of /dev/md1 to be on beginning of the first drive (hda3). I pick next 20 bytes from /dev/md1 and I can find them on /dev/hda3 starting just after address 0x10000. The bytes before and after those 20 bytes are similar to those on /dev/md1. So now I hexedit /dev/md1 and write by hand 32 bytes of 0xAA. Then I look at address 0x10000 on /dev/hda3 - and there is no 0xAA at all. Well.. it's not critical for me, so you can just ignore my mumbling, I was just wondering what obvious did I miss. There seems to be more XORing (or sth. else) involved than I expected. Maybe the disc did not flush writes, and what I see on /dev/md1 is not yet present on /dev/hda3 (how's that possible?) Nevertheless, I think that I will resign from LVM, and just put ext3 on /dev/md1, to avoid this stripe misalignment. I wanted LVM here only because I might wanted to use lvm-snapshot, but I can live without that. I can already grow /dev/md1 without LVM, but using mdadm grow. best regards -- Janek Kozicki | - 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