From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Iordan Iordanov Subject: Re: RAID for USB flash drives Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:22:16 -0500 Message-ID: <4D238F88.7050908@cdf.toronto.edu> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Hank Barta Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Debirf is a project which allows one to create an initrd image which contains a complete Debian system. We use debirf to create an image that we then boot from a single USB stick. We use this to boot a fleet of machines which export iscsi targets, so we don't have to waste a drive bay for the OS. http://cmrg.fifthhorseman.net/wiki/debirf For us, this solution works great, since there is absolutely NO wear on the stick - the entire OS runs in memory. However, this does mean that you would have to consider Debian rather than Ubuntu, or find a way to make debirf work under Ubuntu. As far as constructing the RAID sets, I would look into using larger chunks. Our testing showed that in our environment where our requests are small (of size around 1 - 2kb), large 1MB chunks gave the best performance. Chunks of size 512kb were a close second in performance for us. Booting over the network can create certain chicken-and-egg scenarios which again depend on your environment :). Cheers, Iordan