Hi list, I've an Intel Atom 330 running 32-bit Ubuntu, ~3.5GB RAM. The intent is to store large media files (>4GB) for streaming by maximum 3 clients at any time. Very read heavy. 6x 2TB HDDs are available, the crux is that 3 HDDs are on the on-board SATA controller, the other 3 are on a Marvel PCI-E adapter cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid10] md125 : active raid10 sdg[1] sdf[0] 1953382400 blocks super 1.2 512K chunks 2 far-copies [2/2] [UU] [>....................] resync = 1.1% (22074880/1953382400) finish=642.2min speed=50114K/sec md126 : active raid10 sde[1] sdd[0] 1953382400 blocks super 1.2 512K chunks 2 far-copies [2/2] [UU] [>....................] resync = 1.6% (31473408/1953382400) finish=398.6min speed=80354K/sec md127 : active raid10 sdc[1] sdb[0] 1953382400 blocks super 1.2 512K chunks 2 far-copies [2/2] [UU] [>....................] resync = 1.1% (22630912/1953382400) finish=617.9min speed=52073K/sec unused devices: <none> create commands: 105 sudo mdadm --verbose --create md0 --level=10 --layout=f2 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc 106 sudo mdadm --verbose --create md1 --level=10 --layout=f2 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdd /dev/sde 107 sudo mdadm --verbose --create md2 --level=10 --layout=f2 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdf /dev/sdg 111 sudo mdadm --verbose --create md3 --level=10 --layout=f2 --raid-devices=3 /dev/md/md0 /dev/md/md1 /dev/md/md2 118 sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md124 # to stop seek of death until the above finishes resyncing I read that the far layout gives faster read performance compared to standard RAID1 in a 2 HDD array, so that's why I used it. I then created yet another RAID10 f2 layout of the 3x 2 disk RAID10 volumes, giving me /dev/md124. Filesystem doesn't matter, I need something that's stable with good performance over the RAID set. I just realized that out of 12 TB raw space I now only have 3TB available, heh. So I suppose I'm going for a different layout. Any opinions? Cheers, Mathias -- 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