[TriLUG] Setting Up RAID-5

Ben Pitzer bpitzer at gmail.com
Fri Dec 8 14:55:05 EST 2006


That's a very dangerous blanket statement.  Adding spindles on a half full
raid structure just means uneven striping, and you wind up with degraded
performance anyway. Plus, depending on the FS in place, it may actually
degrade performance initially until the newly added disks are striped up to
the same level as the other disks, and only then does it begin striping
across the whole structure.

Frankly, I'm very intrigued by OpenFiler for home use, but I have not had
the opportunity to play with it at all.  iSCSI can run entirely in software,
and only puts a big hit on if you take advantage of the security features
(which can put a VERY big hit on the CPU).  The MS iSCSI initiator is free,
and while I haven't dug around, I'm pretty sure you could find a free Linux
initiator out there as well, though I would be very cautious as to how good
it would be.

-Ben Pitzer


On 12/8/06, Jim Ray <jim at neuse.net> wrote:
>
> More spindles = more performance
>
> Regards,
>
> Jim
>
> Jim Ray, President
> Neuse River Networks
> tel: 919-838-1672 cell: 919-606-1772
> http://www.Neuse.Net
>
> Neuse River Networks
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
> Behalf Of
> > Brian Henning
> > Sent: Friday, December 08, 2006 12:08 PM
> > To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
> > Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Setting Up RAID-5
> >
> > Christopher L Merrill wrote:
> > > Brian Henning wrote:
> > >> Lee Fickenscher wrote:
> > >>> If uptime and performance aren't really a concern, why even bother
> > >>> with raid?
> > >>
> > >> Two reasons:
> > >> 1) Throughput, particularly on read.  Striping across several disks
> > >> means I can move more than one drive's max data rate at once
> (right?).
> > >
> > > Uhhhmmm...isn't that "performance"?
> >
> > I'd say it is; I never said performance wasn't a concern.  In fact, I
> > said throughput was my #1 concern, followed by data safety, and that
> > only uptime wasn't so much a concern.  (I did say /write/ performance
> > wasn't as much of a concern, which may be where Mr. Fickenscher
> > misinterpreted me).
> >
> > >
> > > C
> > >
> >
> > --
> > ----------------
> > Brian A. Henning
> > strutmasters.com
> > 336.597.2397x238
> > ----------------
> > --
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