quoted

quoted

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 08:26:55 -0600, "Jon Nelson"
[off-list ref] said:

I've found in some tests that raid10,f2 gives me the best I/O
of any raid5 or raid10 format.

Mostly, depending on type of workload. Anyhow in general most
forms of RAID10 are cool, and handle disk losses better and so
on.

However, the performance of raid10,o2 and raid10,n2 in
degraded mode is nearly identical to the non-degraded mode
performance (for me, this hovers around 100MB/s).

You don't say how many drives you got, but may suggest that your
array transfers are limited by the PCI host bus speed.

raid10,f2 has degraded mode performance, writing, that is
indistinguishable from it's non-degraded mode performance

It's the raid10,f2 *read* performance in degraded mode that is
strange - I get almost exactly 50% of the non-degraded mode
read performance. Why is that?

Well, the best description I found of the odd Linux RAID10 modes
is here:

  http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels#Linux_MD_RAID_10

The key here is:

   "The driver also supports a "far" layout where all the drives
    are divided into f sections."

Now when there are two sections as in 'f2', each block will be
written to a block in the first half of the first disk and to
the second half of the "next" disk.

Consider this layout for the first 4 blocks on 2x2 layout
compared to the standard layout:

   DISK		 DISK
  A B C D       A B C D

  1 2 3 4	1 1 2 2
  . . . .	3 3 4 4
  . . . .
  . . . .
  -------
  4 1 2 3       
  . . . .
  . . . .
  . . . .


This means that with the far layout one can read blocks 1,2,3,4
at the same speed as a RAID0 on the outer cylinders of each
disk; but if one of the disks fails, the mirror blocks have to
be read from the inner cylinders of the next disk, which are
usually a lot slower than the outer ones.

Now, there is a very interesting detail here: one idea about
getting a fast array is to take make it out of large high
density drives and just use the outer cylinders of each drive,
thus at the same time having a much smaller range of arm travel
and higher transfer rates.

The 'f2' layout means that (until a drive fails) for all reads
and for "short" writes MD is effectively using just the outer
half of each drive, *as well as* what is effectively a RAID0
layout.

  Note that the sustained writing speed of 'f2' is going to be
  same *across the whole capacity* of the RAID. While the
  sustained write speed of a 'n2' layout will be higher at the
  beginning and slower at the end just like for a single disk.

Interesting, I hadn't realized that, even if I am keenly aware
of the non uniform speeds of disks across cylinders.