*BSD News Article 48250


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From: wilko@yedi.iaf.nl (Wilko Bulte)
Subject: Re: Can FreeBSD do disk striping?
Organization: Private FreeBSD site - Arnhem - The Netherlands
Message-ID: <DCr5ML.12H@yedi.iaf.nl>
References: <3vi4jb$c5t@owl.und.ac.za> <3vnqu7$rme@abel.cc.sunysb.edu>
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 1995 20:44:45 GMT
Lines: 24

vernick@cs.sunysb.edu (Michael Vernick) writes:

>Ewan McPhail (chops@kestrel.ugrd.und.ac.za) wrote:
>: Hi all, here's hoping someone can help me.

>: Simply put, can FreeBSD (2.0.5 R) perform disk striping?
>: I'm interested in doing this to take some of the load off a straining
>: drive (more heads = less of a strain).

>No.  For small normal NFS type reads, it does not pay to stripe
>data across multiple drives.  Instead of paying for 1 seek and 
>rotation per access on 1 drive, you now have N seeks and N rotations.
>(Assuming the drive spindles are not synchronized.)  Why not put
>different file systems on different drives to balance out the load some.

Huh? As long as your incoming I/O load is random in nature and the average
I/O size fits in the stripe size chosen for the stripe set striping works
fine.

>Michael Vernick                          vernick@sbcs.sunysb.edu
>Dept. Of Computer Science @ SUNY SB      (516)-632-8434
>Stony Brook, NY 11794

Wilko