From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Neil Brown Subject: Re: Thoughts on using SSD Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:14:12 +1000 Message-ID: <18911.3556.260172.777291@notabene.brown> References: <49CC0B0D.5000904@tmr.com> <18892.22531.392563.258229@notabene.brown> <49DE7611.4070703@tmr.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: message from Bill Davidsen on Thursday April 9 Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Bill Davidsen Cc: Linux RAID List-Id: linux-raid.ids On Thursday April 9, davidsen@tmr.com wrote: > Neil Brown wrote: > > On Thursday March 26, davidsen@tmr.com wrote: > > > >> I'm building a fairly aggressive machine for both a backup host for > >> virtual machines and spare time development platform, compile engine and > >> testbed both. I want to get cost effective use from an SSD unit, and I > >> propose to use a 32GB unit as follows: for the root filesystem, 12GB, > >> which should hold all the usual root things, and 16GB for swap (12GB > >> RAM, and I want boot and/or hibernate to happen NOW). The remaining > >> space I think might be used for various high impact things, and one of > >> those with speeding raid. > >> > >> If I were to create a small raid device, raid1, made of the 4GB Ssd and > >> 4GB of SATA space, if I made the SATA write-mostly and write-behind, and > >> put the journal for my raid arrays (and bitmaps?) that seems likely to > >> provide a significant performance gain in small storage. > >> > >> Am I missing anything here? Is there an obvious drawback I'm missing? > >> > > > > > > I'd probably just put the journal on the SSD and mount my ext3 > > filesystem data=journal > > > > That has a similar effect to raid1/write-behind in that data is > > written to both but we only wait for the write to the SSD to > > complete. But as it is done at the filesystem level - and the > > filesystem has a much better idea what it is doing - you would expect > > to get much more efficient results. e.g. less wasted memory, much > > larger amount of data that is safe of SSD but still trickling out to > > the HD. > > > > But I think for raid in general you would benefit from having the bitmap > on SSD as well. In my dreams I also put the inodes on that SSD, and > everything runs 10x faster. Unfortunately no f/s seems to offer this. Sounds like hierarchical storage management at a different level. Keep the metadata on a fast device and allow the data to migrate on to slow devices. I'm sure we'll get there one day.... if only there were more hours in the day :-) NeilBrown