Re: raid0 slower than devices it is assembled of?

[davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)]

In article <Pine.LNX.4.58.0312170758220.8541@home.osdl.org>,
Linus Torvalds  <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
| 
| 
| On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Peter Zaitsev wrote:
| > 
| > I'm pretty curious about this argument,
| > 
| > Practically as RAID5 uses XOR for checksum computation you do not have
| > to read the whole stripe to recompute the checksum.
| 
| Ahh, good point. Ignore my argument - large stripes should work well. Mea 
| culpa, I forgot how simple the parity thing is, and that it is "local".
| 
| However, since seeking will be limited by the checksum drive anyway (for 
| writing), the advantages of large stripes in trying to keep the disks 
| independent aren't as one-sided. 

There is no "the" parity drive, remember the RAID-5 parity is
distributed. A write takes two seeks, a read, a data write, and a parity
write, but the parity isn't a bottleneck, and as noted above the size
only need be the blocks containing the modified data.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.