Hmm. replying a few days late..

On Thu, 2002-05-09 at 07:56, steve ulrich wrote:
> when last we saw our hero (Wednesday, May 08, 2002), 
>  Mike Hicks was madly tapping out:
> > I mentioned in my previous message that we also have a Linux/Sparc
> > system that apparently has much better transfer rates.  However, I
> > should point out that it's using software RAID-0 across 3 9GB disks. 
> > Since it's speed approaches 30MB/s, I presume that each 9GB disk can
> > transfer about 10MB/s.  The 18GB drives in other systems probably have
> > similar or better performance.
> 
> bear in mind that w/RAID 0 you don't get any redundancy (you lack a
> parity disk) that said you should see significant performance wins
> here.  comparing a RAID 5 config vs. a RAID 0 config is horribly
> misleading and is comparing apples to oranges.

Yeah, the RAID-0 is being used as an Amanda holding disk -- a space to
temporarily store backed-up filesystems before they get dumped to tape. 
We needed to be able to use the disk space as efficiently as possible
and have high-speed access.  It's not being used as long-term storage
(at most, backed-up filesystems might stay on there a week), so I
figured the data-redundancy wasn't necessary.

As for comparing RAID-0 to RAID-5, yeah, that's a stretch.  However, I
figured that I could at least get a good guess as to how fast each drive
is.  Ignoring bus contention issues, I figure each drive probably maxes
out at around 1/3 the measured transfer rate.  Since that adds up to
about 10MB/s, I figured the RAID-5 array should be getting at least that
speed.

Anyway, we're still looking into it, but won't be able to do much until
the semester is over.

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   You see, it's like the old
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   saying, "Everybody loves a
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)  cane."
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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