Justin Piszcz wrote:
On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, Bill Davidsen wrote:
Justin Piszcz wrote:
On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, Mattias Wadenstein wrote:
On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, Justin Piszcz wrote:
------
Now to my setup / question:
# fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 150.0 GB, 150039945216 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 18241 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5667c24a
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 18241 146520801 fd Linux raid
autodetect
---
If I use 10-disk RAID5 with 1024 KiB stripe, what would be the
correct start and end size if I wanted to make sure the RAID5 was
stripe aligned?
Or is there a better way to do this, does parted handle this
situation better?
From that setup it seems simple, scrap the partition table and use
the
disk device for raid. This is what we do for all data storage disks
(hw raid) and sw raid members.
/Mattias Wadenstein
Is there any downside to doing that? I remember when I had to take
my machine apart for a BIOS downgrade when I plugged in the sata
devices again I did not plug them back in the same order, everything
worked of course but when I ran LILO it said it was not part of the
RAID set, because /dev/sda had become /dev/sdg and overwrote the MBR
on the disk, if I had not used partitions here, I'd have lost (or
more of the drives) due to a bad LILO run?
As other posts have detailed, putting the partition on a 64k aligned
boundary can address the performance problems. However, a poor choice
of chunk size, cache_buffer size, or just random i/o in small sizes
can eat up a lot of the benefit.
I don't think you need to give up your partitions to get the benefit
of alignment.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark
Hrmm..
I am doing a benchmark now with:
6 x 400GB (SATA) / 256 KiB stripe with unaligned vs. aligned raid setup.
unligned, just fdisk /dev/sdc, mkpartition, fd raid.
aligned, fdisk, expert, start at 512 as the off-set
Per a Microsoft KB:
Example of alignment calculations in kilobytes for a 256-KB stripe
unit size:
(63 * .5) / 256 = 0.123046875
(64 * .5) / 256 = 0.125
(128 * .5) / 256 = 0.25
(256 * .5) / 256 = 0.5
(512 * .5) / 256 = 1
These examples shows that the partition is not aligned correctly for a
256-KB stripe unit size until the partition is created by using an
offset of 512 sectors (512 bytes per sector).
So I should start at 512 for a 256k chunk size.
I ran bonnie++ three consecutive times and took the average for the
unaligned, rebuilding the RAID5 now and then I will re-execute the
test 3 additional times and take the average of that.
I'm going to try another approach, I'll describe it when I get results
(or not).
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark
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