2009/12/22 Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld@xxxxxxxxxx>: > On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 06:34:55PM +0200, Ciprian Dorin, Craciun wrote: >> Hello all! >> >> I've created a 64G RAID 1 matrix from 3 real disks. (I intend to >> use this as a target for backups.) >> Now while playing around with this array, I've observed that the >> read performance is quite low because it always reads from the disk in >> the first slot (which happens to be the slowest...) >> >> So my questions are: >> * is there any way to tell the MD driver to load-balance the reads >> between the three disks? > > It does not make sense to do distributed reading in raid1 for sequential > files. This is because it will not be faster to read from more drives, > as this will only make the reading from one drive skipping blocks on > that drive. In other words, in the time you use for skipping blocks on > one drive, you could just as well have read the blocks. So then better > just read all the blocks off one drive, and then do other possible IO > from other drives. Aha. It makes sens now. But, does it mean that if I have parallel IO's (from different read operations) they are going to be distributed between the disks? > RAID10 is a modern form of raid1, which can do better distributed > reading, especially raid10,f2 is good for disks, while raid10,o2 may be > better for SSDs. > > Best regards > Keld Unfortunately my setup forces me to use RAID1. (Because any of the three drives should be usable for a full recovery of the backup data.) (P.S.: Just to be clear, I'm not using RAID as a backup solution, but rather a redundancy solution for the backup solution. :) ) Thanks. -- 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