On Wed Jan 06, 2010 at 02:58:16PM -0500, Curt Hartung wrote:

Tried to ferret out the answer to this myself and so far so bad.

This just 'popped in there' while I was optimizing something completely 
different... in a RAID-1, writes have to be mirrored of course, thats 
what RAID-1 is, but for reads, could they not be sped up by a 
significant amount if a storage pattern was chosen such that large 
blocks of data were "striped" in an in-order/out-of-order scheme? In 
other words, store all the data on both drives, but in huge (2x cache 
size) -ish blocks that might allow 50% of a given [large] access to come 
from each drive, with trivial [smaller] reads always coming from one or 
the other chosen at random.

Downside, I know, is that the data would be organized ina  way only the 
raid subsystem would understand, so the niceness of pulling a mirrored 
drive out of service and it being a literal copy of the otehr drive 
would be lost, but for such a speedup I'd be willing to pay the price of 
always having to access it as a failed set (worst case) through the 
md-daemon.

Am I off into the weeds?

I doubt this would help much really.  If you're reading sequential data
then it's pretty much as quick to keep reading as to seek to the next
chunk.  If you want a performance and are prepared to throw out strict
RAID1 compatibility then RAID10-f2 may be better suited.  It still
provides the same redundancy but improves read performance by striping
(there's some slowdown on writes but not much).

Cheers,
    Robin
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