On 24/01/12 04:00, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
(I'm not on the list, please CC on replies.) Hi! While recently setting up a media server for a HTPC, I was wondering whether it'd be possible to set things up so that most disks can be kept spun down most of the time. Since the majority of the I/O on this sort of server is reads, the first idea was to store (directories of) media files entirely on individual disks, i.e. to not distribute them over all disks by striping, as that would require spinning up each disk on reads. So, creating a large RAID(5/6) array out of all of the disks wouldn't be option here. RAID1ing pairs of disks would work, but this is somewhat wasteful, as it eats up half of your space. The ideal way of doing this would be to take N-1 disks out of your N disk set, and create separate filesystems on each of the disks, and store different sets of files on them, while using the last disk, disk N, as a parity disk of the N-1 data disks. This is equivalent to raid4 with the stripe size equal the size of one disk, and where the data disks get individual /dev/mdX entries instead of being concatenated into one large /dev/mdX. Would this be easy to implement? thanks, Lennert
What about a raid5 with a truly massive chunk size? Brute force and inelegant, but simple to try.
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