John Robinson wrote: : On 12/12/2011 11:54, Jan Kasprzak wrote: : > Is there any way how to tell mdadm explicitly how to set up : >the pairs of mirrored drives inside a RAID-10 volume? : : If you're using RAID10,n2 (the default layout) then adjacent pairs : of drives in the create command will be mirrors, so your command : line should be something like: : : # mdadm --create /dev/mdX -l10 -pn2 -n44 /dev/shelf1drive1 : /dev/shelf2drive1 /dev/shelf1drive2 ... OK, this works, thanks! : Having said that, if you think there's a real chance of a shelf : failing, you probably ought to think about adding more redundancy : within the shelves so that you can survive another drive failure or : two while you're running on just one shelf. I am aware of that. I don't think the whole shelf will fail, but who knows :-) : If you are sticking with RAID10, you can potentially get double the : read performance using the far layout - -pf2 - and with the same : order of drives you can still survive a shelf failure, though your : use of port multipliers may well limit your performance anyway. On the older hardware I have a majority of writes, so the far layout is probably not good for me (reads can be cached pretty well at the OS level). After some experiments with my new hardware, I have discovered one more serious problem: I have simulated an enclosure failure, so half of the disks forming the RAID-10 volume disappeared. After removing them using mdadm --remove, and adding them back, iostat reports that they are resynced one disk a time, not all just-added disks in parallel. Is there any way of adding more than one disk to the degraded RAID-10 volume, and get the volume restored as fast as the hardware permits? Otherwise, it would be better for us to discard RAID-10 altogether, and use several independent RAID-1 volumes joined together using LVM (which we will probably use on top of the RAID-10 volume anyway). I have tried mdadm --add /dev/mdN /dev/sd.. /dev/sd.. /dev/sd.., but it behaves the same way as issuing mdadm --add one drive at a time. Thanks, -Yenya -- | Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak <kas at {fi.muni.cz - work | yenya.net - private}> | | GPG: ID 1024/D3498839 Fingerprint 0D99A7FB206605D7 8B35FCDE05B18A5E | | http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/ Journal: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/blog/ | Please don't top post and in particular don't attach entire digests to your mail or we'll all soon be using bittorrent to read the list. --Alan Cox -- 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