>>> On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:44:30 +0000, pg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >>> (Peter Grandi) said: [ ... ] > I have a few corrections and extensions for this message: > * With 'f2' the main price to pay is that *peak* writing speed And the average. The peak writing speed is impaired by writing two chunks to each drive, the average by the seeking. Another way of looking at 'far' layouts is that given the same number of disks as 'near', they have twice the width of the stripe on reads, but the same width stripe on write plus seeking. [ ... ] > - With 'f2' the first chunk gets written to the top of drive > 1, and bottom of drive 2. Then the next chunk is written > to the top of drive 2, and the bottom of drive 3. Drive 2 > writes must be serialized and arm must move half a disk. Also note what happens on a whole-strip write, which for RAID10,n2 on 6 disks would have been 3 chunks, the width of the RAID0 layer. With RAID10,f2 the _apparent_ width of the RAID0 layer is 6 chunks, but since we need to write each chunk twice, we end up writing two chunks per drive, and with a half-disk seek between them, which gives the same parallelism as RAID10,n2 plus the cost of the seeks. So lower performance than RAID10,n2 writes, and how much lower depending on the frequency of the seeks. [ ... ] > mdadm -C /dev/r10f2 -n raid10 -n 4 \ > /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb2 \ > /dev/sdb1 /dev/sda2 Should be '-l raid10 -p n2'. [ ... ] > mdadm -C /dev/r10f2 -l raid0 -n 3 /dev/mirr1 /dev/mirr2 /dev/mirr3 Should be '/dev/raid10f3'. The mostly equivalent RAID10,n3 layout: mdadm -C /dev/r10f3 -l raid10 -p n3 -n 6 \ /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc3 \ /dev/sdb1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda3 \ /dev/sdc1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb3 (BTW I haven't tried any of these commands) -- 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