From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andy Smith Subject: Re: Multiple SSDs - RAID-1, -10, or stacked? TRIM? Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 20:37:50 +0000 Message-ID: <20131010203750.GV1779@bitfolk.com> References: <20131009123135.GT1779@bitfolk.com> <5256701C.3090807@hardwarefreak.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <5256701C.3090807@hardwarefreak.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Hi Stan, (Thanks everyone else who's responded so far, too -- I'm paying attention with interest) On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 04:15:08AM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > On 10/9/2013 7:31 AM, Andy Smith wrote: > > Are there any gotchas to be aware of? I haven't much experience with > > SSDs. > > Yes, there is one major gotcha WRT md/RAID and SSDs, which to this point > nobody has mentioned in this thread, possibly because it pertains to > writes, not reads. Note my question posed to you up above. Since I've > answered this question in detail at least a dozen times on this mailing > list, I'll simply refer you to one of my recent archived posts for the > details: > > http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/43984 When I first read that link I thought perhaps you were referring to write performance dropping off a cliff due to SSD garbage caching routines that kicked in, but then I read the rest of the thread and I think maybe you were hinting at the single write thread issue you talk about more in: http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg44211.html Is that the case? > To be clear, the need for careful directory/file layout to achieve > parallel throughput pertains only to the linear concatenation storage > architecture described above. If one is using XFS atop a striped array > then throughput, either sequential or parallel, is -not- limited by > file/dir placement across the AGs, as all AGs are striped across the disks. So, in summary do you recommend the stacked RAID-0 on top of RAID-1 pairs instead of a RAID-10, where write performance may otherwise be bottlenecked by md's single write thread? Write ops are a fraction of the random reads and using RAID with a battery-backed write cache solved that problem, but it does need to scale linearly with whatever improvement we can get for the read ops, so I would think it will still be something worth thinking about, so thanks for pointing that out. Thanks, Andy