Wow, I can't believe the number of responses I've received to this question. I've been trying to digest it all. I'm going to throw some follow-up comments as time allows, starting here... On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 3:43 AM, David Brown <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > If you are not too bothered about write performance, I'd put a fair amount > of the budget into ram rather than just disk performance. When you've got > the ram space to make sure small reads are mostly cached, the main > bottleneck will be sequential reads - and big hard disks handle sequential > reads as fast as expensive SSDs. I could be wrong, but I'm not so sure RAM would be beneficial for our case. Are workload is virtually all reads, however, these are huge reads. The analysis programs basically do a full read of data files that are generally pretty big: roughly 100 MB to 5 GB in the worst case. Average file size is maybe 500 MB (rough estimate). And there are hundreds of these falls, all of which need "immediate" access. So to cache these in RAM, seems like it would take an awful lot of RAM. -- 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
