Hello, Originally, I setup a single RAID5 array using 3, 1 TB SATA drives and put LVM2 on top to allow for easier administration. Based upon my needs (at the time) and what I had read about RAID, I decided to use a decently large chunk size (256k) for md0. Initially, I was serving predominantly large files (1gb+ each) so I tried to optimize everything for that. Now my needs have changed: I need to accommodate both, large and small files. It was suggested to me to partition the drives and then create multiple arrays from the partitions, each with their own optimized chunk size. However, wouldn't this cause the drives to excessively thrash or is that only bound to happen under high I/O loads? This array is only used by 6-12 people, primarily through NFS/Samba so I'm not expecting it to have incredibly high I/O loads, but I don't want the disks to die prematurely due to excessive thrashing. Is there any other downside or advantages to this approach? Is it commonly used? I know the ideal approach would be to have more drives and make them a separate array, but that's not possible yet. Also, just to double check, I shouldn't expect any adverse performance (than normal) when using LVM2 with multiple arrays on multiple partitions? One final thing, when using LVM2 & mdadm what, if any, optimizations/considerations should be taken into account to enhance performance? I've come across quite a few threads that seem to address this topic, but they didn't seem to be very cohesive nor authoritative. I've tried some optimizations that I've come across, e.g. setting the read ahead parameters for each drive, stripe cache, partition offset, XFS sunit/swidth, etc but I'm not sure which ones I'm missing or have a significant impact. I apologize in advance if this topic has been covered already, but I wasn't able to find a clear answer to this topic in my searches, so I thought I'd ask. Thanks for the help, Adeel _________________________________________________________________ When your life is on the go—take your life with you. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/115298558/direct/01/-- 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
